Archive for the ‘Legal Informatics’ Category
Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
Integrating the US’ Documents by Eric Mill.
From the post:
A few weeks ago, we integrated the full text of federal bills and regulations into our alert system, Scout. Now, if you visit CISPA or a fascinating cotton rule, you’ll see the original document – nicely formatted, but also well-integrated into Scout’s layout. There are a lot of good reasons to integrate the text this way: we want you to see why we alerted you to a document without having to jump off-site, and without clunky iframes.
As importantly, we wanted to do this in a way that would be easily reusable by other projects and people. So we built a tool called us-documents that makes it possible for anyone to do this with federal bills and regulations. It’s available as a Ruby gem, and comes with a command line tool so that you can use it with Python, Node, or any other language. It lives inside the unitedstates project at unitedstates/documents, and is entirely public domain.
This could prove to be real interesting. Both as a matter of content and a technique to replicate elsewhere.
I first saw this at: Mill: Integrating the US’s Documents.
Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Monday, May 20th, 2013
FuzzyLaw
From the webpage:
(…)
FuzzyLaw has gathered explanations of legal terms from members of the public in order to get a sense of what the ‘person on the street’ has in mind when they think of a legal term. By making lay-people’s explanations of legal terms available to interpreters, police and other legal professionals, we hope to stimulate debate and learning about word meaning, public understanding of law and the nature of explanation.
The explanations gathered in FuzzyLaw are unusual in that they are provided by members of the public. These people, all aged over 18, regard themselves as ‘native speakers’, ‘first language speakers’ and ‘mother tongue’ speakers of English and have lived in England and/or Wales for 10 years or more. We might therefore expect that they will understand English legal terminology as well as any member of the public might. No one who has contributed has ever worked in the criminal law system or as an interpreter or translator. They therefore bring no special expertise to the task of explanation, beyond whatever their daily life has provided.
We have gathered explanations for 37 words in total. You can see a sample of these explanations on FuzzyLaw. The sample of explanations is regularly updated. You can also read responses to the terms and the explanations from mainly interpreters, police officers and academics. You are warmly invited to add your own responses and join in the discussion of each and every word. Check back regularly to see how discussions develop and consider bookmarking the site for future visits. The site also contains commentaries on interesting phenomena which have emerged through the site. You can respond to the commentaries too on that page, contributing to the developing research project.
(…)
Have you ever wondered that the ‘person on the street’ thinks about relational databases, RDF or the Semantic Web?
Those are the folks who are being pushed content based on interpretations not their own making.
Here’s a work experiment for you:
- Take ten search terms from your local query log.
- At each department staff meeting, distribute sheets with the words, requesting everyone to define the terms in their own words. No wrong answers.
- Tally up the definitions per department and across the company.
- Comments anyone?
I first saw this at: FuzzyLaw: Collection of lay citizens’ understandings of legal terminology.
Posted in Law, Legal Informatics, Semantic Diversity, Semantic Inconsistency, Users | No Comments »
Saturday, April 27th, 2013
Bulk Access to Law-Related Linked Data: LC & VIAF Name Authority Records and LC Subject Authority Records
From the post:
Linked Data versions of Library of Congress name authority records and subject authority records are now available for bulk download from the Library of Congress Linked Data Service, according to Kevin Ford at Library of Congress.
In addition, VIAF, the Virtual International Authority File, now provides bulk access to Linked Data versions of name authority records for organizations, including government entities and business organizations, from more than 30 national or research libraries. VIAF data are also searchable through the VIAF Web user interface.
Always good to have more data but I would use caution with the Library of Congress authority records.
See for example, TFM (To Find Me) Mark Twain.
Authority record means just that, a record issued by an authority.
The state of being a “correct” records is something else entirely.
Posted in Law, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Sunday, March 24th, 2013
Mapping the Supreme Court
From the webpage:
The Supreme Court Mapping Project is an original software-driven initiative currently in Beta development. The project, under the direction of University of Baltimore School of Law Assistant Professor Colin Starger, seeks to use information design and software technology to enhance teaching, learning, and scholarship focused on Supreme Court precedent.
The SCOTUS Mapping Project has two distinct components:
Enhanced development of the Mapper software. This software enables users to create sophisticated interactive maps of Supreme Court doctrine by plotting relationships between majority, concurring and dissenting opinions. With the software, users can both visualize how different “lines” of Supreme Court opinions have evolved, and employ animation to make interactive presentations for audiences.
Building an extensive library of Supreme Court doctrinal maps. By highlighting the relationships between essential and influential Court opinions, these maps promote efficient learning and understanding of key doctrinal debates and can assist students, scholars, and practitioners alike. The library already includes maps of key regions of doctrine surrounding the Due Process Clause, the Commerce Clause, and the Fourth Amendment.
The SCOTUS Mapping Project is in Beta-phase development and is currently seeking Beta participants. If you are interested in participating in the Beta phase of the project, contact Prof. Starger.
For identifying and learning lines of Supreme Court decisions, an excellent tool.
I thought the combined mapping in Maryland v. King (warrantless suspicionless search of DNA violated the Fourth Amendment?):
is particularly useful. (Image is a link to the original image.)
It illustrates that Supreme Court decisions on the Fourth Amendment are more mixed than is represented in the popular press.
Using prior decisions as topics, it would be interesting to see a topic map of the social context of those prior decisions.
No Supreme Court decision occurs in a vacuum.
Posted in Law, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Sunday, March 3rd, 2013
Data models for version management of legislative documents by María Hallo Carrasco, M. Mercedes Martínez-González, and Pablo de la Fuente Redondo.
Abstract:
This paper surveys the main data models used in projects including the management of changes in digital normative legislation. Models have been classified based on a set of criteria, which are also proposed in the paper. Some projects have been chosen as representative for each kind of model. The advantages and problems of each type are analysed, and future trends are identified.
I first saw this at Legal Informatics, which had already assembled the following resources:
The legislative metadata models discussed in the paper include:
Useful as models of change tracking should you want to express that in a topic map.
To say nothing of overcoming the semantic impedance between these model.
Posted in Data Models, Government, Government Data, Legal Informatics | 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 »
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 »
Friday, January 11th, 2013
Legal Informatics Glossary of Terms by Grant Vergottini.
From the post:
I work with people from around the world on matters relating to legal informatics. One common issue we constantly face is the issue of terminology. We use many of the same terms, but the subtly of their definitions end up causing no end of confusion. To try and address this problem, I’ve proposed a number of times that we band together to define a common vocabulary, and when we can’t arrive at that, at least we can understand the differences that exist amongst us.
To get the ball rolling, I have started a wiki on GitHub and populated it with many of the terms I use in my various roles. Their definitions are a work-in-progress at this point. I am refining them as I find the time. However, rather than trying to build my own private vocabulary, I would like this to be a collaborative effort. To that end, I am inviting anyone with an interest in this to help build out the vocabulary by adding your own terms with definitions to the list and improving the ones I have started.
My legal informatics glossary of terms can be found in my public legal Informatics project at:
https://github.com/grantcv1/Legal-Informatics/wiki/Glossary
Now there is a topic map sounding like project.
I first saw this at: Vergottini: Legal Informatics Glossary of Terms.
Posted in Glossary, Legal Informatics | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012
Jurimetrics (Modern Uses of Logic in Law (MULL))
From the about page:
Jurimetrics, The Journal of Law, Science, and Technology (ISSN 0897-1277), published quarterly, is the journal of the American Bar Association Section of Science & Technology Law and the Center for Law, Science & Innovation. Click here to view the online version of Jurimetrics.
Jurimetrics is a forum for the publication and exchange of ideas and information about the relationships between law, science and technology in all areas, including:
- Physical, life and social sciences
- Engineering, aerospace, communications and computers
- Logic, mathematics and quantitative methods
- The uses of science and technology in law practice, adjudication and court and agency administration
- Policy implications and legislative and administrative control of science and technology.
Jurimetrics was first published in 1959 under the leadership of Layman Allen as Modern Uses of Logic in Law (MULL). The current name was adopted in 1966. Jurimetrics is the oldest journal of law and science in the United States, and it enjoys a circulation of more than 8,000, which includes all members of the ABA Section of Science & Technology Law.
I just mentioned this journal in Wyner et al.: An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws, but wanted to also capture its earlier title, Modern Uses of Logic in Law (MULL), because I am likely to search for it as well.
I haven’t looked at the early issues in some years but as I recall, they were quite interesting.
Posted in Law, Legal Informatics, Logic, Semantics | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012
Wyner et al.: An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws
Legal Informatics brings news of Dr. Adam Wyner’s paper, An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws, and quotes the abstract as:
To make legal texts machine processable, the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translated to formal representations that can be automatically reasoned with. The paper considers the latter, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a form that can be reasoned with by a computer, sentences must be parsed and formally represented. The paper presents the state-of-the-art in automatic translation of law to a machine readable formal representation, provides corpora, outlines some key problems, and proposes tasks to address the problems.
The paper originated at Project IMPACT.
If you haven’t looked at semantics and the law recently, this is a good opportunity to catch up.
I have only skimmed the paper and its references but am already looking for online access to early issues of Jurimetrics (a journal by the American Bar Association) that addressed such issues many years ago.
Should be fun to see what has changed and by how much. What issues remain and how they are viewed today.
Posted in Language, Law, Legal Informatics, Machine Learning, Semantics | 1 Comment »
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
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 »
Monday, September 3rd, 2012
Legal Rules, Text and Ontologies Over Time by Monica Palmirani, Tommaso Ognibene and Luca Cervone.
Abstract:
The current paper presents the “Fill the gap” project that aims to design a set of XML standards for modelling legal documents in the Semantic Web over time. The goal of the project is to design an information system using XML standards able to store in an XML-native database legal resources and legal rules in an integrated way for supporting legal knowledge engineers and end-users (e.g., public administrative officers, judges, citizens).
It was refreshing to read:
The law changes over time and consequently change the rules and the ontological classes (e.g., the definition of EU citizenship changed in 2004 with the annexation of 10 new member states in the European Community). It is also fundamental to assign dates to the ontology and to the rules, , based on an analytical approach, to the text, and analyze the relationships among sets of dates. The semantic web cake recommends that content, metadata should be modelled and represented in separate and clean layers. This recommendation is not widely followed from too many XML schemas, including those in the legal domain. The layers of content and rules are often confused to pursue a short annotation syntax, or procedural performance parameters or simply because a neat analysis of the semantic and abstract components is missing.
Not being mindful of time, of the effective date of changes to laws, the dates of events/transactions, can be hazardous to your pocketbook and/or your freedom!
Does your topic map account for time or does it exist in an eternal “now?” like the WWW?
I first saw this at Legal Informatics.
Posted in Legal Informatics, Ontology, Semantics | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 3rd, 2012
OASIS LegalRuleML
From the webpage:
The OASIS LegalRuleML TC defines a rule interchange language for the legal domain. The work enables modeling and reasoning that allows implementers to structure, evaluate, and compare legal arguments constructed using the rule representation tools provided.
Legal Informatics posted a notice of a new tutorial introduction to LegalRuleML.
If you are planning IT or semantic integration projects in legal circles, worth your while to take a look at LegalRuleML.
Posted in Legal Informatics, LegalRuleML, RuleML | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 25th, 2012
The Case for Curation: The Relevance of Digest and Citator Results in Westlaw and Lexis by Susan Nevelow Mart and Jeffrey Luftig.
Abstract:
Humans and machines are both involved in the creation of legal research resources. For legal information retrieval systems, the human-curated finding aid is being overtaken by the computer algorithm. But human-curated finding aids still exist. One of them is the West Key Number system. The Key Number system’s headnote classification of case law, started back in the nineteenth century, was and is the creation of humans. The retrospective headnote classification of the cases in Lexis’s case databases, started in 1999, was created primarily although not exclusively with computer algorithms. So how do these two very different systems deal with a similar headnote from the same case, when they link the headnote to the digesting and citator functions in their respective databases? This paper continues an investigation into this question, looking at the relevance of results from digest and citator search run on matching headnotes in ninety important federal and state cases, to see how each performs. For digests, where the results are curated – where a human has made a judgment about the meaning of a case and placed it in a classification system – humans still have an advantage. For citators, where algorithm is battling algorithm to find relevant results, it is a matter of the better algorithm winning. But no one algorithm is doing a very good job of finding all the relevant results; the overlap between the two citator systems is not that large. The lesson for researchers: know how your legal research system was created, what involvement, if any, humans had in the curation of the system, and what a researcher can and cannot expect from the system you are using.
A must read for library students and legal researchers.
For legal research, the authors conclude:
The intervention of humans as curators in online environments is being recognized as a way to add value to an algorithm’s results, in legal research tools as well as web-based applications in other areas. Humans still have an edge in predicting which cases are relevant. And the intersection of human curation and algorithmically-generated data sets is already well underway. More curation will improve the quality of results in legal research tools, and most particularly can be used to address the algorithmic deficit that still seems to exist where analogic reasoning is needed. So for legal research, there is a case for curation. [footnotes omitted]
The distinction between curation, human gathering of relevant material and aggregation, machine gathering of potentially relevant material looks quite useful.
Curation anyone?
I first saw this at Legal Informatics.
Posted in Aggregation, Curation, Legal Informatics, LexisNexis, Westlaw | No Comments »
Friday, July 20th, 2012
Technology-Assisted Review Boosted in TREC 2011 Results by Evan Koblentz.
From the post:
TREC Legal Track, an annual government-sponsored project for evaluating document review methods, on Friday released its 2011 results containing a virtual vote of confidence for technology-assisted review.
“[T]he results show that the technology-assisted review efforts of several participants achieve recall scores that are about as high as might reasonably be measured using current evaluation methodologies. These efforts require human review of only a fraction of the entire collection, with the consequence that they are far more cost-effective than manual review,” the report states.
The term “technology-assisted review” refers to “any semi-automated process in which a human codes documents as relevant or not, and the system uses that information to code or prioritize further documents,” said TREC co-leader Gordon Cormack, of the University of Waterloo. Its meaning is far wider than just the software method known as predictive coding, he noted.
As such, “There is still plenty of room for improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of technology-assisted review efforts, and, in particular, the accuracy of intra-review recall estimation tools, so as to support a reasonable decision that ‘enough is enough’ and to declare the review complete. Commensurate with improvements in review efficiency and effectiveness is the need for improved external evaluation methodologies,” the report states.
Good snapshot of current results, plus fertile data sets for testing alternative methodologies.
The report mentions the 100 GB data set size was a problem for some participants? (Overview of the TREC 2011 Legal Track, page 2)
Suggestion: Post the 2013 data set as a public data set to AWS. Would be available to everyone and if not using local clusters, they can fire up capacity on demand. More realistic scenario than local data processing.
Perhaps an informal survey of the amortized cost of processing by different methods (cloud, local cluster) would be of interest to the legal community.
I can hear the claims of “security, security” from here. The question to ask is: What disclosed premium your client is willing to pay for security on data you are going to give to the other side if responsive and non-privileged? 25% 50% 125% or more?
BTW, looking forward to the 2013 competition. Particularly if it gets posted to the AWS or similar cloud.
Let me know if you are interested in forming an ad hoc team or investigating the potential for an ad hoc team.
Posted in Document Classification, Legal Informatics, Searching | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 17th, 2012
Searching Legal Information in Multiple Asian Languages by Philip Chung, Andrew Mowbray, and Graham Greenleaf.
Abstract:
In this article the Co-Directors of the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) explain the need for an open source search engine which can search simultaneously over legal materials in European languages and also in Asian languages, particularly those that require a ‘double byte’ representation, and the difficulties this task presents. A solution is proposed, the ‘u16a’ modifications to AustLII’s open source search engine (Sino) which is used by many legal information institutes. Two implementations of the Sino u16A approach, on the Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII), for English and Chinese, and on the Asian Legal Information Institute (AsianLII), for multiple Asian languages, are described. The implementations have been successful, though many challenges (discussed briefly) remain before this approach will provide a full multi-lingual search facility.
If the normal run of legal information retrieval, across jurisdictions, vocabularies, etc. challenging enough, you can try your hand at cross-language retrieval with European and Asian languages, plus synonyms, etc.
I would like to think the synonymy issue, which is noted as open by this paper, could be addressed in part through the use of topic maps. It would be an evolutionary solution, to be updated as our use and understanding of language evolves.
Any thoughts on Sino versus Lucene/Solr 4.0 (alpha I know but it won’t stay that way forever).
I first saw this at Legal Informatics.
Posted in Law, Legal Informatics, Search Engines | 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 »
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 »
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 »
Sunday, June 24th, 2012
Report of Second Phase of Seventh Circuit eDiscovery Pilot Program Published
From Legal Informatics:
The Seventh Circuit Electronic Discovery Pilot Program has published its Final Report on Phase Two, May 2010 to May 2012 (very large PDF file).
A principal purpose of the program is to determine the effects of the use of Principles Relating to the Discovery of Electronically Stored Information in litigation in the Circuit.
The report describes the results of surveys of lawyers who participated in efiling in the Seventh Circuit, and of judges and lawyers who participated in trials in which the Circuit’s Principles Relating to the Discovery of Electronically Stored Information were applied.
True enough, the report is “a very large PDF file.” At 969 pages and 111.5 MB. Don’t try downloading while you are on the road, unless you are in South Korea or Japan.
I don’t have the time today but the report isn’t substantively 969 pages long. Pages of names and addresses, committee minutes, presentations, filler of various kinds. If you find it other than in PDF format, I might be interested in generating a shorter version that might be of more interest.
Bottom line was that cooperation in discovery as it relates to electronically stored information reduces costs and yet maintains standards for representation.
Topic maps can play an important role both in eDiscovery but in relating information together, whatever its original form.
True enough, there are services that perform those functions now, but have you ever taken one of their work products and merged it with another?
By habit or chance, the terms used may be close enough to provide a useful result, but how do you verify the results?
Posted in Law, 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 »