Several Articles on Legal Educational Technology (Papers from BILETA 2012) in New Issue of EJLT

The new issue of European Journal of Law and Technology (Volume 4, Number 1, 2013) is a special issue that contains several papers on legal educational technology, first presented at BILETA 2012: Conference of the British & Irish Legal Educational Technology Association, held 29-30 March 2012 in Newcastle, England, UK.

Here are the contents related to legal educational technology:

• Jonathan Bainbridge, Karen Counsell, Freda Grealy, Paul Maharg, Joel Mills, Rory O’Boyle: iPads in Legal Learning (iLEGALL): mobile devices in professional legal learning
• Wai Shun Chow & Firew Kebede Tiba: Professional Legal Education Reviews: Too Many “What”s, Too Few “How”s.
• Graeme Broadbent & Pamela Sellman: Images of Law and Legal Education: Law School websites and the provision of information
• Janice Ann Denoncourt: Using Film to Enhance Intellectual Property Law Education: Getting the Message Across
• Patricia McKellar & Steven Warburton: Developing an e-reader and e-publishing model for flexible and open learning on a distance learning LLB programme
• Antoinette Muntjewerff: CASE reading, structuring and analyzing decisions by judges
• Philip Leith & Cynthia Fellows: BAILII, Legal Education and Open Access to Law
• Emily Allbon: Too cool for (law) school? Using technology to engage students in legal skills
• Sandra Meredith: Critical review of referencing software when used with OSCOLA

HT @nzjudi

Adreani: Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf

Guillaume Adreani of AHJUCAF has published Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf, la base de données de jurisprudence francophone, Revue générale du droit, January 2013.

The post describes the technology and functionality of Juricaf, the free and open database of francophone supreme court decisions, with particular emphasis on its use of open source software — including Apache Solr and CouchDB — its exposure of metadata in several formats including Dublin Core, its use of schema.org microdata, and the compatibility of its metadata with the Zotero open source citation management system.

Here are excerpts from the introduction:

Juricaf est une base de données de décisions de justice en français accessible gratuitement à l’adresse . Créée à l’initiative de l’AHJUCAF, l’association des cours de cassation francophones et réalisée par le Laboratoire Normologie, linguistique et informatique du Droit de l’Université de Paris I, elle publie à ce jour près de 800 000 documents issus de 42 pays et institutions francophones. Elle bénéficie également du soutien de l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. [...]

Quels sont les facteurs-clés pour la réussite d’un tel projet ?
Le moteur de recherche est au cœur d’un tel outil. Ses performances sont liées à l’utilisation d’outils en Open source. Trois autres critères sont déterminants pour que le projet soit crédible :

• Une alimentation en décisions de justice et une mise à jour automatisée,
• L’ajout d’innovations documentaires,
• Une exposition maximale des métadonnées. [...]

For more details, please see the complete article.

HT @adreagui

Jondet on Using Zotero for Legal Research and Writing

Dr. Nicolas Jondet of University of Strathclyde School of Law has posted slides of his presentation entitled Entrepôts institutionnels et respect des références internationales de citation numérique, given last week at Journées européennes d’informatique 2012 = European Legal e-Access Conference.

The presentation describes the use of the open source citation management software Zotero for legal research and writing.

For more on Zotero and legal citation, please see Professor Frank Bennett’s site CitationStylist and the posts about Zotero at Legal Informatics Blog.

HT @nicolasjondet

Bennett on Jurisdictions, Abbreviation Lists, and Parallel Articles in Multilingual Zotero

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted Multilingual Zotero: jurisdictions, and much else, at CitationStylist.

Here are excerpts of the law-related news in the post:

Jurisdiction input helper. Legal styles in [Multilingual Zotero (MLZ)] rely on URN:LEX codes for jurisdictions and international organizations. This works fine once the data has been entered correctly, but there is many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip, and looking up these codes in a table is an awkwardness that we are here to avoid. A right-click over the Extra field will now open a context menu of the nations of the world, and selected international institutions, with sub-menus for federal jurisdictions. The jurisdiction lists are a first draft: the data is housed on GitHub, and I am very much open to revision proposals. This was prompted in large part by recent exchanges with user Isis on the Zotero forums, where the importance of better UI support for manual data entry became clear.

Abbreviation lists. The minimal abbreviation lists used for testing are now beginning to fill out. Many thanks to Julia Caldwell for getting the ball rolling on this front through her excellent work on the New Zealand Law style and its companion abbreviation list.

Parallel articles. As parallel support now appears to be working reliably for statutes and case reports, I have extended the behaviour to cover serialised journal articles. This does not work for all styles, but those for which it fails cannot be smoothly formatted as collapsed parallels in any case [...]

URN:LEX is an international standard for legal identifiers, in the form of Uniform Resource Names (URNs).

Multilingual Zotero is an unofficial “fork” of the Zotero open source citation management software.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Bennett on Zotero 4 Law and OpenCongress

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted @Zotero 4 Law and OpenCongress.org, at CitationStylist.

Here is a summary of the post:

I am very happy to announce the first operational end-to-end research and citation pipeline for MLZ [Multilingual Zotero] and its family of legal styles. The target site is OpenCongress.org, the excellent legislative tracking site sponsored by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. A screencast covering installation, content download and document drafting (in the breathtakingly short interval of 12 minutes) is available.

Professor Bennett adds:

The screencast shows only the capture of US Code provisions affected by an amending Act. With a bit more effort, we should be able to extend the software to cover the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and statutes referred to only by their popular names. It might be awhile before that happens, but it’s on the do-list. Contributions to that effort (of any sort) would of course be most welcome.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Prebble and Caldwell: Zotero – A Manual for Electronic Legal Referencing

Professor Dr. John Prebble and Julia Caldwell of Victoria University Wellington Faculty of Law have published Zotero – A Manual for Electronic Legal Referencing (2012) (Victoria University Wellington Legal Research Paper no. 18/2012). Here is the abstract:

This manual explains how to operate Zotero.

Zotero is a free, open-source referencing tool that operates by “enter once, use many”. It captures references by one-click acquisition from databases of legal materials that cooperate with it. Users enter other references manually, with similar effort to typing a footnote.

Zotero’s chief strength is multi-style flexibility. Authors build libraries of references that are pasted into scholarly work with one click; authors can choose between legal referencing styles, with Zotero automatically formatting references according to the chosen style. Ability to format seamlessly across a potentially unlimited number of styles distinguishes Zotero from competing referencing tools. Zotero afficionados regularly add more styles.

The present manual is thought to be the only full manual for non-technical users of Zotero. It employs the New Zealand referencing style for examples, but its principles are the same for all styles.

The manual is licensed under a Modified Creative Commons Copyright Licence.

For more information on Zotero for law, please see Frank Bennett‘s Citation Stylist site, and his VoxPopuLII post: CSL, Metadata, and Legal Information that Just Works.

HT @freemoth.

Bennett Launches Site on citeproc-js Legal Citation Features

Professor Frank Bennett of the Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has launched CitationStylist, a new Website that provides information and tools related to the legal citation “features of the citeproc-js citation formatter.”

CitationStylist also provides information and tools related to the multilingual citation features of citeproc-js.

citeproc-js is “a JavaScript implementation of the Citation Style Language (CSL) used by Zotero, Mendeley,” and other citation management applications, according to the citeproc-js Integrator’s Manual.

CitationStylist provides documentation for citeproc-js; the citeproc-js schema; information on validation with citeproc-js legal citation; several citeproc-js tools, including those for feedback, abbreviations, and navigation history; a style for The Bluebook legal citation standard; and announcements.

For more information, please see the CitationStylist site.

HT @fgbjr.

Zotero for Law: Invitation to Contribute

An invitation to contribute to an effort to add law-related functions to the Zotero open source citation management software has been issued by Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University. Specifically, Professor Bennett seeks volunteers to identify “fields and item types that are commonly used in legal writing.” Interested persons are invited to join the Zotero-Legal Google Group devoted to this project.

For more information, please see the announcement posted to LAW-LIB.