Archive for the ‘Law – Sources’ Category
Friday, April 26th, 2013
Once Under Wraps, Supreme Court Audio Trove Now Online
From the post:
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the final cases of the term, which began last October and is expected to end in late June after high-profile rulings on gay marriage, affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act.
Audio from Wednesday’s arguments will be available at week’s end at the court’s website, but that’s a relatively new development at an institution that has historically been somewhat shuttered from public view.
The court has been releasing audio during the same week as arguments only since 2010. Before that, audio from one term generally wasn’t available until the beginning of the next term. But the court has been recording its arguments for nearly 60 years, at first only for the use of the justices and their law clerks, and eventually also for researchers at the National Archives, who could hear — but couldn’t duplicate — the tapes. As a result, until the 1990s, few in the public had ever heard recordings of the justices at work.
But as of just a few weeks ago, all of the archived historical audio — which dates back to 1955 — has been digitized, and almost all of those cases can now be heard and explored at an online archive called the Oyez Project.
A truly incredible resources for U.S. history in general and legal history in particular.
The transcripts and tapes are synchronized so your task, if you are interested, is to map these resources to other historical accounts and resources. 
The only disappointment is that the recordings begin with the October term of 1955. One of the most well known cases of the 20th century, Brown v. Board of Education, was argued in 1952 and re-argued in 1953. Hearing Thurgood Marshall argue that case would be a real treat.
I first saw this at: NPR: oyez.org finishes Supreme Court oral arguments project.
Posted in Data, History, Law, Law - Sources | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2013
Strause et al.: How Federal Statutes Are Named, and the Yale Database of Federal Statute Names
Centers on How Federal Statutes Are Named, by Renata E.B. Strause, Allyson R. Bennett, Caitlin B. Tully, M. Douglass Bellis, and Eugene R. Fidell
Law Library Journal, 105, 7-30 (2013), but includes references to a other U.S. statute name resources.
Quite useful if you are developing any indexing/topic map service that involves U.S. statutes.
There is mention of a popular name for French statues resource.
I assume there are similar resources for other legal jurisdictions. If you know of such resources, I am sure the Legal Informatics Blog would be interested.
Posted in Government, Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2013
Wikipedia and Legislative Data Workshop
From the post:
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, 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.
I remain unconvinced about greater transparency into the “apparent” legislative process.
On the other hand, it may provide the “hook” or binding point to make who wins and who loses more evident.
If the Cato representatives mention their ideals being founded in the 18th century, you might want to remember that infant mortality was greater than 40% in foundling hospitals of the time.
People who speak glowingly of the 18th century didn’t live in the 18th century. And imagine themselves as landed gentry of the time.
I first saw this at the Legal Informatics Blog.
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Wikipedia | No Comments »
Saturday, February 23rd, 2013
GPO is Closing Gap on Public Access to Law at JCP’s Direction, But Much Work Remains by Daniel Schuman.
From the post:
The GPO’s recent electronic publication of all legislation enacted by Congress from 1951-2009 is noteworthy for several reasons. It makes available nearly 40 years of lawmaking that wasn’t previously available online from any official source, narrowing part of a much larger information gap. It meets one of three long-standing directives from Congress’s Joint Committee on Printing regarding public access to important legislative information. And it has published the information in a way that provides a platform for third-party providers to cleverly make use of the information. While more work is still needed to make important legislative information available to the public, this online release is a useful step in the right direction.
Narrowing the Gap
In mid-January 2013, GPO published approximately 32,000 individual documents, along with descriptive metadata, including all bills enacted into law, joint concurrent resolutions that passed both chambers of Congress, and presidential proclamations from 1951-2009. The documents have traditionally been published in print in volumes known as the “Statutes at Large,” which commonly contain all the materials issued during a calendar year.
The Statutes at Large are literally an official source for federal laws and concurrent resolutions passed by Congress. The Statutes at Large are compilations of “slip laws,” bills enacted by both chambers of Congress and signed by the President. By contrast, while many people look to the US Code to find the law, many sections of the Code in actuality are not the “official” law. A special office within the House of Representatives reorganizes the contents of the slip laws thematically into the 50 titles that make up the US Code, but unless that reorganized document (the US Code) is itself passed by Congress and signed into law by the President, it remains an incredibly helpful but ultimately unofficial source for US law. (Only half of the titles of the US Code have been enacted by Congress, and thus have become law themselves.) Moreover, if you want to see the intact text of the legislation as originally passed by Congress — before it’s broken up and scattered throughout the US Code — the place to look is the Statutes at Large.
Policy wonks and trivia experts will have a field day but the value of the Statutes at Large isn’t apparent to me.
I assume there are cases where errors can be found between the U.S.C. (United States Code) and the Statutes at Large. The significance of those errors is unknown.
Like my comments on the SEC Midas program, knowing a law was passed isn’t the same as knowing who benefits from it.
Or who paid for its passage.
Knowing which laws were passed is useful.
Knowing who benefited or who paid, priceless.
Posted in Government, Government Data, Law, Law - Sources | No Comments »
Sunday, February 10th, 2013
Lex Machina: IP Litigation and analytics
From the about page:
Every day, Lex Machina’s crawler extracts data and documents from PACER, all 94 District Court sites, ITC’s EDIS site and the PTO site.
The crawler automatically captures every docket event and downloads key District Court case documents and every ITC document. It converts the documents by optical character recognition (OCR) to searchable text and stores each one as a PDF file.
When the crawler encounters an asserted or cited patent, it fetches information about that patent from the PTO site.
Next, the crawler invokes Lex Machina’s state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) technology, which includes Lexpressions™, a proprietary legal text classification engine. The NLP technology classifies cases and dockets and resolves entity names. Attorney review of docket and case classification, patents and outcomes ensures high-quality data. The structured text indexer then orders all the data and stores it for search.
Lex Machina’s web-based application enables users to run search queries that deliver easy access to the relevant docket entries and documents. It also generates lists that can be downloaded as PDF files or spreadsheet-ready CSV files.
Finally, the system generates a daily patent litigation update email, which provides links to all new patent cases and filings.
Lex Machina does not:
- Index the World Wide Web
- Index legal cases around the world in every language
- Index all legal cases in the United States
- Index all state courts in the United States
- Index all federal court cases in the United States
Instead, Lex Machina chose a finite legal domain, patents, that has a finite vocabulary and range of data sources.
Working in that finite domain, Lex Machina has produced a high quality data product of interest to legal professions and lay persons alike.
I intend to leave conquering world hunger, ignorance and poor color coordination of clothing to Bill Gates.
You?
I first saw this at Natural Language Processing in patent litigation: Lex Machina by Junling Hu.
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Sunday, January 20th, 2013
Operation Asymptote
Operation Asymptote’s goal is to make U.S. federal court data freely available to everyone.
The data is available now, but free only up to $15 worth every quarter.
Serious legal research hits that limit pretty quickly.
The project does not cost you any money, only some of your time.
The result will be another source of data to hold the system accountable.
So, how real is your commitment to doing something effective in memory of Aaron Swartz?
Posted in Government, Government Data, Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, January 13th, 2013
U.S. GPO releases House bills in bulk XML
Bills from the current Congress but for bulk download in XML.
Users guide.
GPO press release.
Bulk House Bills Download.
Another bulk data source from the U.S. Congress.
Integration of the legislative sources will be none trivial but it has been done before, manually.
What will be more interesting will be tracking the more complex interpersonal relationships that underlie the surface of legislative sources.
Posted in Government Data, Law, Law - Sources | No Comments »
Saturday, November 3rd, 2012
2013 Federal Rules by LII Now Available on eLangdell by Sarah Glassmeyer.
From the post:
Once again, CALI is proud to partner with our friends at the Legal Information Institute to provide free ebooks of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence. The 2013 Editions (effective December 1, 2012) as well as the 2012 and 2011 editions can be found on the eLangdell Bookstore.
Our Federal Rules ebooks include:
- The complete rules as of December 1, 2012 (for the 2013 edition).
- All notes of the Advisory Committee following each rule.
- Internal links to rules referenced within the rules.
- External links to the LII website’s version of the US Code.
These rules are absolutely free for you to download, copy and use however you want. However, they aren’t free to make. If you’d like to donate some money to LII instead of paying money to commercial publishers, they’ve set up a donation page. A little money donated to LII goes a long way towards making the law free and accessible to all.
Legal materials are a rich area for development of semantic tools. Decades of research and development by legal publishers set a high mark for something new and useful.
If you are interested in U.S. Federal Procedure, this is your starting point.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are a good example of defining process without vagueness, confusion and contradiction. (Supply your own examples of where the contrary is the case.)
Posted in Law, Law - Sources | No Comments »
Saturday, September 29th, 2012
On Legislative Collaboration and Version Control
John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation writes:
We often are confronted with the idea of legislation being written and tracked online through new tools, whether it’s Clay Shirky’s recent TED talk, or a long, long list of experiments and pilot projects (including Sunlight’s PublicMarkup.org and Rep. Issa’s MADISON) designed to give citizens a new view and voice in the production of legislation.
Proponents of applying version control systems to law have a powerful vision: a bill or law, with its history laid bare and its sections precisely broken out, and real names attached prominently to each one. Why shouldn’t we able to have that? And since version control systems are helpful to the point of absolute necessity in any collaborative software effort, why wouldn’t Congress employ such an approach?
When people first happen upon this idea, their reaction tends to fall into two camps, which I’ll refer to as triumphalist and dismissive.
John’s and the Sunlight Foundation’s view that legislative history of acts of Congress is a form of transparency is the view taught to high school civics classes. And about as naive as it comes.
True enough, there are extensive legislative histories for every act passed by Congress. That has very little to do with how laws come to be written, by who and for whose interests.
Say for example a lobbyist who has contributed to a Senator’s campaign is concerned with the rules for visa’s for computer engineers. He/she visits the Senator and just happens to have a draft of amendments, created by a well known Washington law firm, that addresses their needs. That document is studied by the Senator’s staff.
Lo and behold, similar language appears in a bill introduced by the Senator. (Or as an amendment to some other bill.)
The Senator will even say that he is sponsoring the legislation to further the interests of those “job creators” in the high tech industry. What gets left out is the access to the Senator by the lobbyist and the assistance in bringing that legislation to the fore.
Indulging governments in their illusions of transparency is the surest way to avoid meaningful transparency.
Now you have to ask yourself, who has an interest in avoiding meaningful transparency?
I first saw this at Legal Informatics (which has other links that will interest you).
Posted in Law, Law - Sources | No Comments »
Sunday, September 23rd, 2012
What if all transactions required strict global consistency? by Matthew Aslett.
Matthew quotes Basho CTO Justin Sheehy on eventual consistency and traditional accounting:
“Traditional accounting is done in an eventually-consistent way and if you send me a payment from your bank to mine then that transaction will be resolved in an eventually consistent way. That is, your bank account and mine will not have a jointly-atomic change in value, but instead yours will have a debit and mine will have a credit, each of which will be applied to our respective accounts.”
And Matthew comments:
The suggestion that bank transactions are not immediately consistent appears counter-intuitive. Comparing what happens in a transaction with a jointly atomic change in value, like buying a house, with what happens in normal transactions, like buying your groceries, we can see that for normal transactions this statement is true.
We don’t need to wait for the funds to be transferred from our accounts to a retailer before we can walk out the store. If we did we’d all waste a lot of time waiting around.
This highlights a couple of things that are true for both database transactions and financial transactions:
- that eventual consistency doesn’t mean a lack of consistency
- that different transactions have different consistency requirements
- that if all transactions required strict global consistency we’d spend a lot of time waiting for those transactions to complete.
All of which is very true but misses an important point about financial transctions.
Financial transactions (involving banks, etc.) are eventually consistent according to the same rules.
That’s no accident. It didn’t just happen that banks adopted ad hoc rules that resulted in a uniform eventual consistency.
It didn’t happen over night but the current set of rules for “uniform eventual consistency” of banking transactions are spelled out by the Uniform Commercial Code. (And other laws, regulations but that is a major part of it.)
Dare we say a uniform semantic for financial transactions was hammered out without the use of formal ontologies or web addresses? And that it supports billions of transactions on a daily basis? To become eventually consistent?
Think about the transparency (to you) of your next credit card transaction. Standards and eventual consistency make that possible.
Posted in Consistency, Database, Finance Services, Law, Law - Sources | No Comments »
Sunday, September 16th, 2012
Supreme Court Database–Updated
Michael Heise writes:
An exceptionally helpful source of data for those interested in US Supreme Court decisions was recently updated to include data from OT2011. The Supreme Court Database (2012 release, v.01, here) “contains over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the Court between the 19[46] and 20[11] terms. Examples include the identity of the court whose decision the Supreme Court reviewed, the parties to the suit, the legal provisions considered in the case, and the votes of the Justices.” An online codebook for this leading compilation of Supreme Court decisions (particularly for political scientists) can be found here.
The Supreme Court Database sponsors this dataset, tools for analysis and training materials to assist you with both.
Very useful for combining with other data and analysis, ranging from political science and history to more traditional legal approaches.
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Monday, September 10th, 2012
Sunlight Academy
From the website:
Welcome to Sunlight Academy, a collection of interactive tutorials for journalists, activists, researchers and students to learn about tools by the Sunlight Foundation and others to unlock government data.
Be sure to create a profile to access our curriculum, track your progress, watch videos, complete training activities and get updates on new tutorials and tools.
Whether you are an investigative journalist trying to get insight on a complex data set, an activist uncovering the hidden influence behind your issue, or a congressional staffer in need of mastering legislative data, Sunlight Academy guides you through how to make our tools work for you. Let’s get started!
The Sunlight Foundation has created tools to make government data more accessible.
Unlike some governments and software projects, the Sunlight Foundation business model isn’t based on poor or non-existent documentation.
Modules (as of 2012 September 10):
- Tracking Government
- Scout Scout is a legislative and governmental tracking tool from the Sunlight Foundation that alerts you when Congress or your state capitol talks about or takes action on issues you care about. Learn how to search and create alerts on federal and state legislation, regulations and the Congressional Record.
- Scout (Webinar) Recorded webinar and demo of Scout from July 26, 2012. The session covered basic skills such as search terms and bill queries, as well as advanced functions such as tagging, merging outside RSS feeds and creating curated search collections.
- Unlocking Data
- Political Ad Sleuth Frustrated by political ads inundating your TV? Learn how you can discover who is funding these ads from the public files at your local television station through this tutorial.
- Unlocking APIs What are APIs and how do they deliver government data? This tutorial provides an introduction to using APIs and highlights what Sunlight’s APIs have to offer on legislative and congressional data.
- Lobbying
- Lobbying Contribution Reports These reports highlight the millions of dollars that lobbying entities spend every year giving to charities in honor of lawmakers and executive branch officials, technically referred to as “honorary fees.” Find out how to investigate lobbying contribution reports, understand the rules behind them and see what you can do with the findings.
- Lobbying Registration Tracker Learn about the Lobbying Registration Tracker, a Sunlight Foundation tool that allows you to track new registrations for federal lobbyists and lobbying firms. This database allows users to view registrations as they’re submitted, browse by issue, registrant or client, and see the trends in issues and registrations over the last 12 months.
- Lobbying Report Form Four times a year, groups that lobby Congress and the federal government file reports on their activities. Unlock the important information contained in the quarterly lobbying reports to keep track of who’s influencing whom in Washington. Learn tips on how to read the reports and how they can inform your reporting.
- Data Analysis
- Data Visualizations in Google Docs While Google is often used for internet searches and maps, it can also help with data visualizations via Google Charts. Learn how to use Google Docs to generate interactive charts in this training.
- Mapping Campaign Finance Data Campaign finance data can be complex and confusing — for reporters and for readers. But it doesn’t have to be. One way to make sense of it all is through mapping. Learn how to turn campaign finance information into beautiful maps, all through free tools.
- Pivot Tables Pivot tables are powerful tools, but it’s not always obvious how to use them. Learn how to create and use pivot tables in Excel to aggregate and summarize data that otherwise would require a database.
- Research Tools
- Advanced Google Searches Google has made search easy and effective, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better. Learn how to effectively use Google’s Advanced Search operators so you can get what you’re looking for without wasting time on irrelevant results.
- Follow the Unlimited Money (webinar) Recorded webinar from August 8, 2012. This webinar covered tools to follow the millions of dollars being spent this election year by super PACs and other outside groups.
- Learning about Data.gov Data.gov seeks to organize all of the U.S. government’s data, a daunting and unfinished task. In this module, learn about the powers and limitations of Data.gov, and what other resources to use to fill in Data.gov’s gaps.
Posted in Government, Government Data, Law, Law - Sources | No Comments »
Monday, September 10th, 2012
Researching Current Federal Legislation and Regulations: A Guide to Resources for Congressional Staff
Description quoted at Full Text Reports:
This report is designed to introduce congressional staff to selected governmental and nongovernmental sources that are useful in tracking and obtaining information federal legislation and regulations. It includes governmental sources such as the Legislative Information System (LIS), THOMAS, the Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDsys), and U.S. Senate and House websites. Nongovernmental or commercial sources include resources such as HeinOnline and the Congressional Quarterly (CQ) websites. It also highlights classes offered by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Library of Congress Law Library.
This report will be updated as new information is available.
Direct link to PDF: Researching Current Federal Legislation and Regulations: A Guide to Resources for Congressional Staff
A very useful starting point for research on U.S. federal legislation and regulations, but only a starting point.
Each listed resource merits a user’s guide. And no two of them are exactly the same.
Suggestions for research/topic map exercises based on this listing of resources?
Posted in Government, Government Data, Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Sunday, August 26th, 2012
Linked Legal Data: A SKOS Vocabulary for the Code of Federal Regulations by Núria Casellas.
Abstract:
This paper describes the application of Semantic Web and Linked Data techniques and principles to regulatory information for the development of a SKOS vocabulary for the Code of Federal Regulations (in particular of Title 21, Food and Drugs). The Code of Federal Regulations is the codification of the general and permanent enacted rules generated by executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government of the United States, a regulatory corpus of large size, varied subject-matter and structural complexity. The CFR SKOS vocabulary is developed using a bottom-up approach for the extraction of terminology from text based on a combination of syntactic analysis and lexico-syntactic pattern matching. Although the preliminary results are promising, several issues (a method for hierarchy cycle control, expert evaluation and control support, named entity reduction, and adjective and prepositional modifier trimming) require improvement and revision before it can be implemented for search and retrieval enhacement of regulatory materials published by the Legal Information Institute. The vocabulary is part of a larger Linked Legal Data project, that aims at using Semantic Web technologies for the representation and management of legal data.
Considers use of nonregulatory vocabularies, conversion of existing indexing materials and finally settles on NLP processing of the text.
Granting that Title 21, Food and Drugs is no walk in the part, take a peek at the regulations for Title 26, Internal Revenue Code.
A difficulty that I didn’t see mentioned is the changing semantics in statutory law and regulations.
The definition of “person,” for example, varies widely depending upon where it appears. Both chronologically and synchronically.
Moreover, if I have a nonregulatory vocabulary and/or CFR indexes, why shouldn’t that map to the CFR SKOS vocabulary?
I may not have the “correct” index but the one I prefer to use. Shouldn’t that be enabled?
I first saw this at Legal Informatics.
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Linked Data, SKOS | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 17th, 2012
Proposed urn:lex codes for US materials in MLZ
From the post:
The MLZ styles rely on a urn:lex-like scheme for specifying the jurisdiction of primary legal materials. We will need to have at least a minimal set of jurisdction codes in place for the styles to be functional. The scheme to be used for this purpose is the subject of this post.
The urn:lex scheme is used in MLZ for the limited purpose of identifying jurisdictional scope: it is not a full document identifier, and does not carry information on the issuing institution itself. Even within this limited scope, the MLZ scheme diverges from the examples provided by the Cornell LII Lexcraft pages, in that the “federal” level is expressed as a geographic scope (set off by a semicolon), rather than as a distinct category of jurisdiction (appended by a period).
Unfortunate software isn’t designed to use existing identification systems.
On the other hand, computer identification systems started when computers were even dumber than they are now. Legacy issue I suppose.
If you are interested in “additional” legal identifier systems, or in the systems that use them, this should be of interest.
Or if you need to map such urn:lex codes to existing identifiers for the same materials. The ones used by people.
I first saw this at Legal Informatics.
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Monday, July 9th, 2012
Verrier: Visualizations of the French Civil Code
Legal Informatics reports in part:
Jacques Verrier has posted two visualizations of the French Code civil:
Code civil – Cartographie [a video showing the evolution of the Code civil by means of network graphs]
Code civil des Français [a network graph of the structure of the Code civil linked to the full text of the code]
Being from the only “civilian” jurisdiction in the United States (Louisiana) and having practiced law there, I had to include this as a resource. In addition to it being a good illustration of visualizing important subject matter.
The post also points to a variety of visualizations of the United States case and statutory law.
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Visualization | No Comments »
Friday, June 29th, 2012
Bruce: How Well Does Current Legislative Identifier Practice Measure Up?
From Legal Informatics:
Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School (LII) has posted Identifiers, Part 3: How Well Does Current Practice Measure Up?, on LII’s new legislative metadata blog, Making Metasausage.
In this post, Tom surveys legislative identifier systems currently in use. He recommends the use of URIs for legislative identifiers, rather than URLs or URNs.
He cites favorably the URI-based identifier system that John Sheridan and Dr. Jeni Tennison developed for the Legislation.gov.uk system. Tom praises Sheridan’s (here) and Tennison’s (here and here) writings on legislative URIs and Linked Data.
Tom also praises the URI system implemented by Dr. Rinke Hoekstra in the Leibniz Center for Law‘s Metalex Document Server for facilitating point-in-time as well as point-in-process identification of legislation.
Tom concludes by making a series of recommendations for a legislative identifier system:
See the post for his recommendations (in case you are working on such a system) and for other links.
I would point out that existing legislation has identifiers from before it receives the “better” identifiers specified here.
And those “old” identifiers will have been incorporated into other texts, legal decisions and the like.
Oh.
We can’t re-write existing identifiers so it’s a good thing topic maps accept subjects having identifiers, plural.
Posted in Identifiers, Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Thursday, June 28th, 2012
A Simple URL Shortener for Legal Materials: L4w.us, by Ontolawgy
Legal Informatics reports on a URL shortener for legal citations.
Not exactly the usual URL shortener, it produces a “human readable” URL for U.S. Congress, U.S. Public Laws, the U.S. Code, and the Federal Register citations.
Compare:
U.S. Public Law 111-148
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ148/html/PLAW-111publ148.htm
versus
For a plain text version: http://L4w.us/PublicLaw/text/111-148
or http://L4w.us/Pub. L. 111-148 text
Human readable citation practices existed at the time of the design of URLs. Another missed opportunity that we are still paying for.
Posted in Law, Law - Sources | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 27th, 2012
An API for European Union legislation
From the webpage:
The API can help you conduct research, create data visualizations or you can even build applications upon it.
This is an application programming interface (API) that opens up core EU legislative data for further use. The interface uses JSON, meaning that you have easy to use machine-readable access to meta data on European Union legislation. It will be useful if you want to use or analyze European Union legislative data in a way that the official databases are not originally build for. The API extracts, organize and connects data from various official sources.
Among other things we have used the data to conduct research on the decision-making time*, analyze voting patterns*, measure the activity of Commissioners* and visualize the legislative integration process over time*, but you can use the API as you want to. When you use it to create something useful or interesting be sure to let us know, if you want to we can post a link to your project from this site.
For some non-apparent reason, the last paragraph has hyperlinks for the “*” characters. So that is not a typo, that is how it appears in the original text.
There are a large number of relationships captured by data accessible through this API. The sort of relationships that topic maps excel at handling.
I first saw this at: DZone: An API for European Union legislation
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Saturday, June 23rd, 2012
Fastcase Introduces e-Books, Beginning with Advance Sheets
From the post:
According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase advance sheets will be available “for each state, federal circuit, and U.S. Supreme Court”; will be free of charge and “licensed under [a] Creative Commons BY-SA license“; and will include summaries. Each e-Book Advance Sheet will contain “one month’s judicial opinions (designated as published and unpublished) for specific states or courts.”
According to Sean Doherty’s post, future Fastcase e-Books will include “e-book case reporters with official pagination and links” into the Fastcase database, as well as “topical reporters” on U.S. law, covering fields such as securities law and antitrust law.
According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase’s approach to e-Books is inspired in part by CALI‘s Free Law Reporter, which makes case law available as e-Books in EPUB format.
For details, see the links in the post at Legal Informatics.
I mention it because not only could you have “topical reporters” but information products that are tied to even narrower areas of case law.
Such as litigation that a firm has pending or very narrow areas of liability (for example) of interest to a particular client. Granting there are “case watch” resources in every trade zine, but hardly detailed enough to do more than “excite the base” as they say.
With curated content from a topic map application, rather than “exciting the base,” you could be sharpening the legal resources you can whistle up on behalf of your client. Increasing their appreciate and continued interest in representation by you.
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 12th, 2012
how much of commonsense and legal reasoning is formalizable? A review of conceptual obstacles by Jame Franklin.
Abstract:
Fifty years of effort in artificial intelligence (AI) and the formalization of legal reasoning have produced both successes and failures. Considerable success in organizing and displaying evidence and its interrelationships has been accompanied by failure to achieve the original ambition of AI as applied to law: fully automated legal decision-making. The obstacles to formalizing legal reasoning have proved to be the same ones that make the formalization of commonsense reasoning so difficult, and are most evident where legal reasoning has to meld with the vast web of ordinary human knowledge of the world. Underlying many of the problems is the mismatch between the discreteness of symbol manipulation and the continuous nature of imprecise natural language, of degrees of similarity and analogy, and of probabilities.
I haven’t (yet) been able to access a copy of this article.
From the abstract,
….mismatch between the discreteness of symbol manipulation and the continuous nature of imprecise natural language, of degrees of similarity and analogy, and of probabilities.
I suspect it will be useful reminder of the boundaries to formal information systems.
I first saw this at Legal Informatics: Franklin: How Much of Legal Reasoning Is Formalizable?
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Friday, May 25th, 2012
Bruce on Legislative Identifier Granularity
From the post:
In this post, Tom [Bruce] explores legislative identifier granularity, or the level of specificity at which such an identifier functions. The post discusses related issues such as the incorporation of semantics in identifiers; the use of “pure” (semantics-free) legislative identifiers; and how government agency authority and procedural rules influence the use, “persistence, and uniqueness” of identifiers. The latter discussion leads Tom to conclude that
a “gold standard” system of identifiers, specified and assigned by a relatively independent body, is needed at the core. That gold standard can then be extended via known, stable relationships with existing identifier systems, and designed for extensible use by others outside the immediate legislative community.
Interesting and useful reading.
Even though a “gold standard” of identifiers for something as dynamic as legislation, isn’t likely.
Or rather, isn’t going to happen.
There are too many stakeholders in present systems for any proposal to carry the day.
Not to mention decades, if not centuries, of references in other systems.
Posted in Identifiers, Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
Crowdsourced Legal Case Annotation
From the post:
This is an academic research study on legal informatics (information processing of the law). The study uses an online, collaborative tool to crowdsource the annotation of legal cases. The task is similar to legal professionals’ annotation of cases. The result will be a public corpus of searchable, richly annotated legal cases that can be further processed, analysed, or queried for conceptual annotations.
Adam and Wim are computer scientists who are interested in language, law, and the Internet.
We are inviting people to participate in this collaborative task. This is a beta version of the exercise, and we welcome comments on how to improve it. Please read through this blog post, look at the video, and get in contact.
Non-trivial annotation of complex source documents.
What you do with the annotations, such as create topic maps, etc. would be a separate step.
The early evidence for the enhancement of our own work, based on the work of others, Picking the Brains of Strangers…, should make this approach even more exciting.
PS: I saw this at Legal Informatics but wanted to point you directly to the source article.
Just musing for a moment but what if the conclusion on collaboration and access is that by restricting access we impoverish not only others, but ourselves as well?
Posted in Annotation, Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
Bruce on the Functions of Legislative Identifiers
From Legal Informatics:
In this post, Tom [Bruce] discusses the multiple functions that legislative document identifiers serve. These include “unique naming,” “navigational reference,” “retrieval hook / container label,” “thread tag / associative marker,” “process milestone,” and several more.
A promised second post will examine issues of identifier design.
Enjoy and pass along!
Posted in Identifiers, Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »