Good Law Initiative Launch Event, 16 April 2013: Tweets and Resources

This post links to tweets and selected resources from the 16 April 2013 launch event for the Good Law Initiative, a project of the UK Office of the Parliamentary Counsel.

The main page for the initiative appears to be called Good law – Detailed guidance – GOV.UK.

Click here for video of the event.

The Office’s announcement of the Good Law initiative is called Join the good law conversation.

Twitter tweets from the launch event are now archived in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the event, and for other Good Law activities, is #goodlaw

On 16 April 2013 the Office published a new report entitled When laws become too complex: Review by Office of the Parliamentary Counsel into the causes of complex legislation, which is also called the OPC Good Law Report or the Good Law Report.

For more information about the Good Law Initiative, please see Good law – Detailed guidance, or Good Law Initiative: UK Government Effort to Make Legislation More Effective and Accessible.

HT @johnlsheridan

Good Law Initiative: UK Government Effort to Make Legislation More Effective and Accessible

The UK Office of the Parliamentary Counsel is launching “the ‘Good Law’ initiative, with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation,” at an event to be held 16 April 2013, at the Institute for Government, London, England.

The Twitter hashtag for the initiative is #goodlaw

Here are excerpts of the announcement:

Legislation is difficult. The volume of statute law and regulations, together with their piecemeal structure, level of detail, and frequent amendments, mean that citizens find law complex, hard to understand, and difficult to comply with. That can generate barriers to economic activity, as well as burdens for individuals, businesses, and communities. It obstructs good government, and it undermines the rule of law.

Efforts have been made to address aspects of the problem. Parliamentary Counsel has adopted a simple, plain English style. The National Archives have improved access to up-to-date legislation through legislation.gov.uk. The Law Commission has a programme of special Bills for law reform, consolidation and repeals. But the problem remains.

At this event, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel launches the ‘good law’ initiative with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation. Join us to discuss what ‘good law’ means in practice. What do users expect from legislation? How can we make it more accessible? When is complexity in legislation desirable? And when is unavoidable?

I believe that at the launch event, John Sheridan of The National Archives will give a presentation about the role of legislation.gov.uk in the Good Law initiative.

For more information about the launch event or to register for the event, please see the event announcement.

Click here for more information about the principles underlying the Good Law project.

HT @johnlsheridan

Knake on Democratizing Legal Education

Professor Renee Newman Knake of Michigan State University and the ReInventLaw Lab has posted Democratizing Legal Education, forthcoming in Connecticut Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

Millions of Americans lack representation for their legal problems while thousands of lawyers are unemployed. Why? Commentators and academics offer a range of answers to this question, from economic factors to regulatory constraints. Whatever the root cause, clearly a massive delivery problem exists for personal legal services. Most individuals simply do not realize when a lawyer might be necessary or helpful. This Article, written at the invitation of the Connecticut Law Review for their Volume 45 Symposium entitled “Are Law School’s Passing the Bar? Examining the Demands and Limitations of the Legal Education Market,” suggests that democratizing legal education — i.e., systematically providing basic information about how to access legal services to the general public — offers a solution to the unmet need for those services, as well as to the unemployment crisis among the legal profession more broadly. Law schools have an important role to play in this effort. This article offers three recommendations.

The recommendations are:

First, law schools can fuel innovation in new markets and in methods for delivery, thereby leading to greater public awareness of legal services. Second, schools and regulators should work together to reduce the cost and time involved in training and licensing for lawyers who desire to engage in limited practice areas that are underserved, such as housing, domestic relations, and child custody. Third, law schools should educate the public about law, lawyers, and legal services through programs that also enhance student learning.

14-15 March: Wikipedia and Legislative Data Workshop, Washington, DC

Jim Harper, Esq., of the Cato Institute tells us of this interesting event:

Wikipedia and Legislative Data Workshop, 14-15 March, Washington, DC.

Description:

Interested in the bills making their way through Congress?

Think they should be covered well in Wikipedia?

Well, let’s do something about it!

On Thursday and Friday, March 14th and 15th, we are hosting a conference here at the Cato Institute to explore ways of using legislative data to enhance Wikipedia.

Our project to produce enhanced XML markup of federal legislation is well under way [see examples of the XML markup at DeepBills (here and here)], and we hope to use this data to make more information available to the public about how bills affect existing law, federal agencies, and spending, for example.

What better way to spread knowledge about federal public policy than by supporting the growth of Wikipedia content?

Thursday’s session is for all comers. Starting at 2:30 p.m., we will familiarize ourselves with Wikipedia editing and policy, and at 5:30 p.m. we’ll have a Sunshine Week reception. (You don’t need to attend in the afternoon to come to the reception. Register now!)

On Friday, we’ll convene experts in government transparency, in Wikipedia editorial processes and decisions, and in MediaWiki technology to think things through and plot a course.

Do you have relevant interests and experience? Please apply! Applications for participation in the Friday session are due Friday, March 1. [...]

For more information or to register, please see the announcement.

HT @Jim_Harper

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Sinha on Ad Hoc [Legal] Learning in an Online World

Dr. Sushant Sinha of Indian Kanoon has posted slides of his new presentation entitled Ad Hoc Learning in an Online World, given at Teaching Media Policy and Law – A Faculty Workshop, held 24-25 April 2012 at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.

The presentation covers the following topics:

• My ad hoc legal learning on the Internet
• How does ad hoc learning compare to formal education?
• Why does legal education need to go beyond lawyers?

For more information, please see the slides.

HT @sushantsinha.

Rabb and Bhatti on a New Web Resource About Islamic Law: Islawmix

Professor Dr. Intisar A. Rabb of Boston College Law School, and Umbreen Bhatti, Esq., of Disability Rights Legal Center gave a presentation entitled Islawmix: Content and Context for Islamic Law in the News, on 3 October 2011, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

islawmix is a project of The Berkman Center.

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

Recent years have seen an uptick in coverage of Islamic law (sharīʿa) in American news media, policy, and academic circles. What are the rules that dictate how Muslims in America conduct themselves? How do or should our legal institutions respond? When reporting on issues involving Muslims, how can journalists or academics distinguish individual preference or culture from Islamic law? What available, authoritative resources can best inform interested readers, from the casual to the scholarly? islawmix aims to fill the information gap in this important area. In this talk, Intisar A. Rabb — Berkman Fellow and faculty of Boston College Law School — and Umbreen Bhatti — co-founder of islawmix and a lawyer with experience in civil rights and constitutional law — walk through “why islawmix” and explore how islawmix aims to accomplish the rather ambitious task of providing accessible resources for parsing such complex information and developing resources for the aggregation and contextualization of significant trends in Islamic law.

islawmix is on Twitter: @islawmix.