Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

February 24, 2015

Enhanced Access to UK Legislation

Filed under: Government,Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 11:28 am

The site legislation.gov.uk appears to be a standard legal access site, albeit from 1267 CE to present.

Its Changes made by legislation enacted from 2002 – present is useful but suffers from presenting changes to texts with tables.

Next year will be the 30th anniversary of the publication of ISO 8879, the SGML standard and texts are still aligned with tables to show changes. There have been better ways to present changes, HyTime, XML with XLink/Xpointer, and more recent additions to the XML family such as XPath and XQuery.

Inline presentation of changes with a navigation aid to choose the source of changes would be far more intuitive. Perhaps in a future version of this resource.

I say in a future version of this site because of the following description of the hopes for this site:

In 2014 big data moved centre stage, with the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Data for Law project, which was launched to facilitate socio-economic research and identify patterns in the way we legislate. This involves digitising the entire statute book and presenting the data so that all UK legislation can be analysed, together with publicly available data from legal publishers such as LexisNexis and Westlaw.

‘It’s better to count than to guess,’ observes David Howarth, a legal academic and former MP who co-leads the project. ‘Big Data for Law will provide the most comprehensive record of all UK legislation ever created, together with analytical tools. Although these will be most useful for the public sector, government, researchers and policy-makers, it is also useful to law firms, particularly those with public policy practices who will be able to gain insights into the changing regulatory environment.’

Firms and lawyers will be able to use the Big Data for Law resources to identify patterns and trends in particular areas of legislation. An important consideration is to publish the data in a form that will enable researchers to work with it effectively – and present their findings clearly.

Another part of the project uses big data as a design tool, to identify patterns within statutes – combinations of rules that are used repeatedly to meet policy goals. This is effectively extracting the structure of legislation and thinking about how it can be reused. Howarth suggests that law firms could also apply this approach to legal documents.

John Sheridan, head of legislation services for the National Archives and senior investigator for the Big Data for Law project, highlights the importance of creating tools and methods that are accessible to those without deep statistical knowledge as well as developing pre-packaged analysis that researchers and others can use and cite in documents: ‘For example, we can plot fluctuations in the number of laws made year on year, and in the length of the text.

‘We can discover how modular legislation is in particular areas and frequency of legislative change. We can also examine the language of law which uncovers the topics of the day and reflects major global events and political and economic trends.’

Mapping the statute book identifies commonly recurring themes and language patterns. Sheridan and his team have identified patterns for licensing, prohibition, regulators, tax and so on, with the purpose of enabling interested parties to quickly gain an understanding of a particular legislative development and identify commonly occurring solutions to particular issues.

The ability to search the entirety of UK legislation using time-based parameters and particular words and phrases makes it straightforward to find relevant laws pertaining to a specific issue, which is particularly useful to parties involved in litigation. Sheridan underlines the importance of visual presentation to plot patterns and trends, and the ability to drill down into the detail.

Isn’t that an extraordinary description of the potential for a public access to legislation site?

Patterns in legislation? Policy goals linked to external events? Language analysis?

I didn’t see any of those features, yet, but assume that they will be forthcoming.

February 21, 2015

No First Amendment for Tweets?

Filed under: Government,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 7:41 pm

U.S. Government Demands Social Media Censorship by Kurt Nimmo.

From the post:

Congress and the White House are leaning on Twitter to censor Islamic State posts on its network.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, the chair of a House foreign affairs subcommittee on terrorism, has singled out Twitter for allowing supposed IS operatives to recruit and propagandize on the social media platform.

“This is the way (the Islamic State) is recruiting — they are getting people to leave their homelands and become fighters,” Poe said.

He added “there is frustration with Twitter specifically” over its refusal to censor tweets the government claims promotes terrorism.

I was hoping to read that Twitter told Congress and the White House to read the Constitution of the United States, especially:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What part of “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press….” seems unclear?

What was the response of Twitter?

Twitter has responded to the accusations by saying it provides user tracking information on alleged IS members to the FBI.

…

Over the last year, however, Twitter has suspended a large number of IS accounts. It has suspended nearly 800 suspected accounts since last autumn, but this “may be the tip of the iceberg,” as almost 18,000 accounts “related” to the Islamic State were suspended over the same time period, according to JM Berger, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who tracks Islamists on social media.

Assuming IS related accounts don’t violate Twitter’s terms of usage, why should they be suspended? An action for which there is no legal recourse?

Even worse, the censoring of IS on social media leaves the public with no alternative sources of information about IS, other than U.S. vetted propaganda.

An uniformed public cannot effective exercise its democratic franchise. Perhaps that is the goal of censoring IS content on social media. What are government leaders so afraid of the American public and other learning? That we have been lied to by our own government about IS?

Twitter should grow a spine and stop supplying tracking information on suspected IS members, stop suspending IS accounts and appeal to its user base to support those positions.

I fear ignorance and censorship far more than anyone identified as a terrorist by the U.S. government.

I first saw this in a tweet by the U.S. Department of Fear.

February 3, 2015

Handicapping Judges and Lawyers [and Legislators?]

Filed under: Government,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 6:24 pm

Stanford-Bred Startup Uses Moneyball Stats To Handicap Judges, Lawyers by Daniel Fisher.

From the post:

If you’re being sued for patent infringement before U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, there’s something you ought to know. Koh is tough on defendants and only grants 18% of motions for summary judgment, less than half the national average. So your lawyers had better be on their game before they try to convince Koh to chuck out the case, and you’d better have a fallback strategy in case she doesn’t.

These stats are just a sample of what a venture-funded startup with roots in a project funded by Cisco Systems and Apple is doing to bring mathematical analysis to the arcane world of litigation. Where Lexis and Westlaw tell attorneys what the law is, Lex Machina tells them what actually happens in the courtroom.

The system, focusing for now on the litigation-intense world of patent law, has compiled an exhaustive database of patent cases going back to 2000 so companies and lawyers can determine how many times a patent has been the subject of litigation and how the lawsuits were resolved. Lex Machina also handicaps law firms based on their win-loss records before specific judges with specific procedural maneuvers, so in-house attorneys can determine who to hire.

…

As Daniel points out, this service is limited to patent law at the moment but it is a wide open field otherwise. The data is in the public domain (court records) and the real rub is going to be efficient collection of the data.

To a future startup: Be mindful that the same techniques demonstrated here can also be applied to legislators, legislation and campaign contributions at local, state and federal levels.

Your clients can avoid over-paying for largely ineffectual members of Congress and not under bidding for state house speakers when losing isn’t an option.

Handicapping judges, lawyers, legislators won’t ever be 100%, modulo illegal inducements, but you can play your best hand more often.

Realize that other than the offensive terminology, “handicapping,” and the level of detail, this sort of knowledge of local judges was accumulated ad hoc by lawyers in a particular jurisdiction. One of the main reasons for hiring “local” counsel.

The advantage that Lex Machina offers is that the knowledge is detailed and can be offered to anyone willing to pay for it.

Now would be a good time for public spirited foundations to start public handicapping of judges and lawyers projects. Just as an example, rather than election year or episodic reports of judges discriminating against battered women, such a process could provide current a real time view into the operation of the judiciary.

I first saw this in a tweet by Carl Anderson.

January 22, 2015

Supremes “bitch slaps” Patent Court

Filed under: Law,Patents — Patrick Durusau @ 3:20 pm

Supreme Court strips more power from controversial patent court by Jeff John Roberts.

From the post:

The Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday that will have a significant impact on the patent system by limiting the ability of the Federal Circuit, a specialized court that hears patent appeals, to review key findings by lower court judges.

The 7-2 patent decision, which came the same day as a high profile ruling by the Supreme Court on prisoner beards, concerns an esoteric dispute between two pharmaceutical companies, Teva and Sandoz, over the right way to describe the molecule weight of a multiple sclerosis drug.

The Justices of the Supreme Court, however, appears to have taken the case in part because it presented another opportunity to check the power of the Federal Circuit, which has been subject to a recent series of 9-0 reversals and which some regard as a “rogue court” responsible for distorting the U.S. patent system.

As for the legal decision on Tuesday, it turned on the question of whether the Federal Circuit judges can review patent claim findings as they please (“de novo”) or only in cases where they has been serious error. Writing for the majority, Justice Stephen Breyer concluded that the Federal Circuit could not second guess how lower courts interpret those claims (a process called “claim construction”) except on rare occasions.

There is no doubt the Federal Circuit has done its share of damage to the patent system but it hasn’t acted alone. Congress and the patent system itself bear a proportionate share of the blame.

Better search and retrieval technology can’t clean out the mire in the USPTO stables. That is going to require reform from Congress and a sustained effort at maintaining the system once it has been reformed.

In the meantime, knowing that another blow has been dealt the Federal Circuit on patent issues will have to sustain reform efforts.

January 15, 2015

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) (Update)

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Law,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 8:05 pm

Obama’s proposed changes to the computer hacking statute: A deep dive by Orin Kerr.

From the post:

As part of the State of the Union rollout, President Obama has announced several new legislative proposals involving cybersecurity. One of the proposals is a set of amendments to the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”), the federal computer hacking statute. This post takes a close look at the main CFAA proposal. It starts with a summary of existing law; it then considers how the Administration’s proposal would change the law; and it concludes with my views on whether Congress should enact the changes.

My bottom line: My views are somewhat mixed, but on the whole I’m skeptical of the Administration’s proposal. On the downside, the proposal would make some punishments too severe, and it could expand liability in some undesirable ways. On the upside, there are some notable compromises in the Administration’s position. They’re giving up more than they would have a few years ago, and there are some promising ideas in there. If the House or Senate Judiciary Committees decides to work with this proposal, there’s room for a more promising approach if some language gets much-needed attention. On the other hand, if Congress does nothing with this proposal and just sits on it, letting the courts struggle with the current language, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
…

Just as general awareness you need to read Orin’s take on the proposed amendments.

What I find disturbing from Orin’s analysis is that the administration has been pushing for increased punishments in this area for years.

I find that troubling because the purpose of longer sentences isn’t to put a guilty person in jail longer. Longer sentences enable you to threaten an innocent person with a long time in jail (does Aaron Swartz comes to mind?).

You can force an innocent person to inform on their friends, plead guilty to charges they aren’t guilty of, to work uncover to entrap others.

No, I don’t think increased sentences are as benign as Orin seems to think.

Increased sentences are key to more overreaching by federal prosecutors in marginal cases.

If you had the alternatives of a guarantee of ninety-nine (99) years in jail versus entrapping someone in a crime as an informant, which one would you take?

The administration isn’t asking for that much of an increase here but you really don’t want to do federal time outside of one of the club feds for the rich doctors/lawyers that cheat on their taxes.

January 14, 2015

Confessions of an Information Materialist

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Texts — Patrick Durusau @ 4:09 pm

Confessions of an Information Materialist by Aaron Kirschenfeld.

There aren’t many people in the world that can tempt me into reading UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) comments (again) but it appears that Aaron is one of them, at least this time.

Aaron was extolling on the usefulness of categories for organization and organization of information in particular and invokes “Official Comment 4a to UCC 9-102 by the ALI & NCCUSL.” (ALI = American Law Institute, NCCUSL = National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. Seriously, that’s really their name.)

I will quote part of it so you can get the flavor of what Aaron is praising:

The classes of goods are mutually exclusive. For example, the same property cannot simultaneously be both equipment and inventory. In borderline cases — a physician’s car or a farmer’s truck that might be either consumer goods or equipment — the principal use to which the property is put is determinative. Goods can fall into different classes at different times. For example, a radio may be inventory in the hands of a dealer and consumer goods in the hands of a consumer. As under former Article 9, goods are “equipment” if they do not fall into another category.

The definition of “consumer goods” follows former Section 9-109. The classification turns on whether the debtor uses or bought the goods for use “primarily for personal, family, or household purposes.”

Goods are inventory if they are leased by a lessor or held by a person for sale or lease. The revised definition of “inventory” makes clear that the term includes goods leased by the debtor to others as well as goods held for lease. (The same result should have obtained under the former definition.) Goods to be furnished or furnished under a service contract, raw materials, and work in process also are inventory. Implicit in the definition is the criterion that the sales or leases are or will be in the ordinary course of business. For example, machinery used in manufacturing is equipment, not inventory, even though it is the policy of the debtor to sell machinery when it becomes obsolete or worn. Inventory also includes goods that are consumed in a business (e.g., fuel used in operations). In general, goods used in a business are equipment if they are fixed assets or have, as identifiable units, a relatively long period of use, but are inventory, even though not held for sale or lease, if they are used up or consumed in a short period of time in producing a product or providing a service.

Aaron’s reaction to this comment:

The UCC comment hits me two ways. First, it shows how inexorably linked law and the organization of information really are. The profession seeks to explain or justify what is what, what belongs to who, how much of it, and so on. The comment also shows how the logical process of categorizing involves deductive, inductive, and analogical reasoning. With the UCC specifically, practice came before formal classification, and seeks, much like a foreign-language textbook, to explain a living thing by reducing it to categories of words and phrases — nouns, verbs and their tenses, and adjectives (really, the meat of descriptive vocabulary), among others. What are goods and the subordinate types of goods? Comment 4a to 9-102 will tell you!

All of what Aaron says about Comment 4a to UCC 9-102 is true, if you grant the UCC the right to put the terms of discussion beyond the pale of being questioned.

Take for example:

The classes of goods are mutually exclusive. For example, the same property cannot simultaneously be both equipment and inventory.

Ontology friends would find nothing remarkable about classes of goods being mutually exclusive. Or with the example of not being both equipment and inventory at the same time.

The catch is that the UCC isn’t defining these terms in a vacuum. These definitions apply to UCC Article 9, which governs rights in secured transactions. Put simply, were a creditor has the legal right to take your car, boat, house, equipment, etc.

By defining these terms, the UCC (actually the state legislature that adopts the UCC), has put these terms, their definitions and their relationships to other statutes, beyond the pale of discussion. They are the fundamental underpinning of any discussion, including discussions of how to modify them.

It is very difficult to lose an argument if you have already defined the terms upon which the argument can be conducted.

Most notions of property and the language used to describe it are deeply embedded in both constitutions and the law, such as the UCC. The question of should “property” mean the same thing to an ordinary citizen and a quasi-immortal corporation doesn’t comes up. And under the terms of the UCC, it is unlikely to ever come up.

We need legal language for a vast number of reasons but we need to realize that the users of legal language have an agenda of their own and that their language can conceal questions that some of us would rather discuss.

December 23, 2014

U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates (1774-1875)

Filed under: Government,History,Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 4:35 pm

U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates (1774-1875) by Barbara Davis and Robert Brammer (law library specialists at the Library of Congress).

A video introduction to the website A Century of Lawmaking For a New Nation.

I know you are probably wondering why I would post on this resource considering that I just posted on finding popular topics for topic maps! 😉

Popularity, beyond social media popularity, is in the eye of the beholder. This sort of material would appeal to anyone who debates the “intent” of the original framers of the constitution, the American Enterprise Institute for example.

Justice Justice Scalia would be another likely consumer of a topic map based on these materials. He advocates what Wikipedia calls “…textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation.”

Put anyone seeking to persuade Justice Scalia of their cause, is another likely consumer for such a topic map. Or prospective law clerks for that matter. Tying this material to Scalia’s opinions and other writings would increase the value of such a map.

The topic mapping theory part would be fun but imaging Scalia solving the problem of other minds and discerning their intent over two hundred (200) years later would require more imagination than I can muster on most days.

December 19, 2014

Senate Joins House In Publishing Legislative Information In Modern Formats [No More Sneaking?]

Filed under: Government,Government Data,Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 3:29 pm

Senate Joins House In Publishing Legislative Information In Modern Formats by Daniel Schuman.

From the post:

There’s big news from today’s Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force meeting. The United States Senate announced it would begin publishing text and summary information for Senate legislation, going back to the 113th Congress, in bulk XML. It would join the House of Representatives, which already does this. Both chambers also expect to have bill status information available online in XML format as well, but a little later on in the year.

This move goes a long way to meet the request made by a coalition of transparency organizations, which asked for legislative information be made available online, in bulk, in machine-processable formats. These changes, once implemented, will hopefully put an end to screen scraping and empower users to build impressive tools with authoritative legislative data. A meeting to spec out publication methods will be hosted by the Task Force in late January/early February.

The Senate should be commended for making the leap into the 21st century with respect to providing the American people with crucial legislative information. We will watch closely to see how this is implemented and hope to work with the Senate as it moves forward.

In addition, the Clerk of the House announced significant new information will soon be published online in machine-processable formats. This includes data on nominees, election statistics, and members (such as committee assignments, bioguide IDs, start date, preferred name, etc.) Separately, House Live has been upgraded so that all video is now in H.264 format. The Clerk’s website is also undergoing a redesign.

The Office of Law Revision Counsel, which publishes the US Code, has further upgraded its website to allow pinpoint citations for the US Code. Users can drill down to the subclause level simply by typing the information into their search engine. This is incredibly handy.

…

This is great news!

Law is a notoriously opaque domain and the process of creating it even more so. Getting the data is a great first step, parsing out steps in the process and their meaning is another. To say nothing of the content of the laws themselves.

Still, progress is progress and always welcome!

Perhaps citizen review will stop the Senate from sneaking changes past sleepy members of the House.

November 7, 2014

data.parliament @ Accountability Hack 2014

Filed under: Government,Government Data,Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 2:39 pm

data.parliament @ Accountability Hack 2014 by Zeid Hadi.

From the post:

We are pleased to announce that data.parliament will be providing data to be used during the Accountability Hack 2014

data.parliament is a platform that enables the sharing of UK Parliament’s data with consumers both within and outside of Parliament. Designed to complement existing data services it aims to be the central publishing platform and data repository for data that is produced by Parliament. Note our release is in Alpha.

It provides both a repository (http://api.data.parliament.uk) for data and a Linked Data API (http://lda.data.parliament.uk). The platform’s ‘shop front’ or data catalogue can be found here (http://data.parliament.uk)

The following datasets and APIs are now available on data.parliament

  • Commons Written Parliamentary Questions and Answers
  • Lords Written Parliamentary Questions and Answers
  • Commons Oral Questions and Question Times
  • Early Day Motions
  • Lords Divisions
  • Commons Divisions
  • Commons Members
  • Lords Members
  • Constituencies
  • Briefing Papers
  • Papers Laid

A description of the APIs and their usage can be found at http://lda.data.parliament.uk. All the data exposed by the endpoints can be returned in a variety of formats not least JSON.

To get you started the team has coded two publically available demonstrators that make use of the data in data.parliament. The source code for these can found at https://github.com/UKParliData. One of the demonstrators, a client app, can be found working at http://ddpdemo.azurewebsites.net/. Also be sure to read our blog (http://blog.data.parliament.uk) for quick start guides, updates, and news about upcoming datasets.

The data.parliament team will be on hand at the Hack, both participating and networking through the event to gather feedback and ideas..

I don’t know enough about British parliamentary procedure to comment on the completeness of the interface.

I am quite interested in the Briefing Papers data feed:

This dataset contains the data for research briefings produced by the Libraries of the House of Commons and House of Lords and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Each briefing has a pdf document for the briefing itself as well as a set of metadata to accompany it. (http://www.data.parliament.uk/dataset/04)

A great project but even a complete set of documents and transcripts of every word spoken at Parliament does not document relationships between members of Parliment, their relationships to economic interests, etc.

Looking forward to collation of information from this project with other data to form a clearer picture of the legislative process in the UK.

I first saw this in a tweet by data.parliament UK.

November 6, 2014

Caselaw is Set Free, What Next? [Expanding navigation/search targets]

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 1:31 pm

Caselaw is Set Free, What Next? by Thomas Bruce, Director, Legal Information Institute, Cornell.

Thomas provides a great history of Google Scholar’s caselaw efforts and its impact on the legal profession.

More importantly, at least to me, were his observations on how to go beyond the traditional indexing and linking in legal publications:

A trivial example may help. Right now, a full-text search for “tylenol” in the US Code of Federal Regulations will find… nothing. Mind you, Tylenol is regulated, but it’s regulated as “acetaminophen”. But if we link up the data here in Cornell’s CFR collection with data in the DrugBank pharmaceutical collection , we can automatically determine that the user needs to know about acetaminophen — and we can do that with any name-brand drug in which acetaminophen is a component. By classifying regulations using the same system
that science librarians use to organize papers in agriculture, we can determine which scientific papers may form the rationale for particular regulations, and link the regulations to the papers that explain the underlying science. These techniques, informed by emerging approaches in natural-language processing and the Semantic Web, hold great promise.

All successful information-seeking processes permit the searcher to exchange something she already knows for something she wants to know. By using technology to vastly expand the number of things that can meaningfully and precisely be submitted for search, we can dramatically improve results for a wide swath of users. In our shop, we refer to this as the process of “getting from barking dog to nuisance”, an in-joke that centers around mapping a problem expressed in real-world terms to a legal concept. Making those mappings on a wide scale is a great challenge. If we had those mappings, we could answer a lot of everyday questions for a lot of people.

(emphasis added)

The first line I bolded in the quote:

All successful information-seeking processes permit the searcher to exchange something she already knows for something she wants to know.

captures the essence of a topic map. Yes? That is a user navigates or queries a topic map on the basis of terms they already know. In so doing, they can find other terms that are interchangeable with theirs, but more importantly, if information is indexed using a different term than theirs, they can still find the information.

In traditional indexing systems, think of the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Library of Congress Subject Headings, some users learned those systems in order to become better searchers. Still an interchange of what you know for what you don’t know, but with a large front-end investment.

Thomas is positing a system like topic maps that enables a users to navigate by the terms they know already to find information they don’t know.

The second block of text I bolded:

Making those mappings on a wide scale is a great challenge. If we had those mappings, we could answer a lot of everyday questions for a lot of people.

Making wide scale mappings certainly is a challenge. In part because there are so many mappings to be made and so many different ways to make them. Not to mention that the mappings will evolve over time as usages change.

There is growing realization that indexing or linking data results in a very large pile of indexed or linked data. You can’t really navigate it unless or until you hit upon the correct terms to make the next link. We could try to teach everyone the correct terms but as more correct terms appear everyday, that seems an unlikely solution. Thomas has the right of it when he suggests expanding the target of “correct” terms.

Topic maps are poised to help expand the target of “correct” terms, and to do so in such a way as to combine with other expanded targets of “correct” terms.

I first saw this in a tweet by Aaron Kirschenfeld.

Update: Tarlton Law Libary (University of Texas at Austin) Legal Research Guide has a great page of tips and pointers on the Google Scholar caselaw collection. Bookmark this guide.

November 2, 2014

Introduction to Basic Legal Citation (online ed. 2014)

Filed under: Identifiers,Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 7:34 pm

Introduction to Basic Legal Citation (online ed. 2014) by Peter W. Martin.

From the post:

This work first appeared in 1993. It was most recently revised in the fall of 2014 following a thorough review of the actual citation practices of judges and lawyers, the relevant rules of appellate practice of federal and state courts, and the latest edition of the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, released earlier in the year. As has been true of all editions released since 2010, it is indexed to both the ALWD guide and the nineteenth edition of The Bluebook. However, it also documents the many respects in which contemporary legal writing, very often following guidelines set out in court rules, diverges from the citation formats specified by those academic texts.

The content of this guide is also available in three different e-book formats: 1) a pdf version that can be printed out in whole or part and also used with hyperlink navigation on an iPad or other tablet, indeed, on any computer; 2) a version designed specifically for use on the full range of Kindles as well as other readers or apps using the Mobi format; and 3) a version in ePub format for the Nook and other readers or apps that work with it. To access any of them, click here. (Over 50,000 copies of the 2013 edition were downloaded.)

Since the guide is online, its further revision is not tied to a rigid publication cycle. Any user seeing a need for clarification, correction, or other improvement is encouraged to “speak up.” What doesn’t work, isn’t clear, is missing, appears to be in error? Has a change occurred in one of the fifty states that should be reported? Comments of these and other kinds can sent by email addressed to peter.martin@cornell.edu. (Please include “Citation” in the subject line.) Many of the features and some of the coverage of this reference are the direct result of past user questions and advice.

A complementary series of video tutorials offers a quick start introduction to citation of the major categories of legal sources. They may also be useful for review. Currently, the following are available:

  1. Citing Judicial Opinions … in Brief (8.5 minutes)
  2. Citing Constitutional and Statutory Provisions … in Brief (14 minutes)
  3. Citing Agency Material … in Brief (12 minutes)

Finally, for those with an interest in current issues of citation practice, policy, and instruction, there is a companion blog, “Citing Legally,” at: http://citeblog.access-to-law.com.

Obviously legal citations are identifiers but Peter helpfully expands on the uses of legal citations:

A reference properly written in “legal citation” strives to do at least three things, within limited space:

  • identify the document and document part to which the writer is referring
  • provide the reader with sufficient information to find the document or document part in the sources the reader has available (which may or may not be the same sources as those used by the writer), and
  • furnish important additional information about the referenced material and its connection to the writer’s argument to assist readers in deciding whether or not to pursue the reference.

I would quibble with Peter’s description of a legal citation “identif[ing] a document or document part,” in part because of his second point, that a reader can find an alternative source for the document.

To me it is easier to say that legal citation identifies a legal decision, legislation or agency decision/rule, which may be reported by any number of sources. Some sources have their own unique references systems that are mapped to other systems. Making a legal decision, legislation or agency decision/rule an abstraction identified by the citation, avoids confusion with a particular source.

A must read for law students, practitioners, judges and potential inventors of the Nth citation system for legal materials.

October 28, 2014

Guide to Law Online

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 2:22 pm

Guide to Law Online

From the post:

The Guide to Law Online, prepared by the Law Library of Congress Public Services Division, is an annotated guide to sources of information on government and law available online. It includes selected links to useful and reliable sites for legal information.

Select a Link:

The Guide to Law Online is an annotated compendium of Internet links; a portal of Internet sources of interest to legal researchers. Although the Guide is selective, inclusion of a site by no means constitutes endorsement by the Law Library of Congress.

In compiling this list, emphasis wherever possible has been on sites offering the full texts of laws, regulations, and court decisions, along with commentary from lawyers writing primarily for other lawyers. Materials related to law and government that were written by or for lay persons also have been included, as have government sites that provide even quite general information about themselves or their agencies.

Every direct source listed here was successfully tested before being added to the list. Users, however, should be aware that changes of Internet addresses and file names are frequent, and even sites that usually function well do not always do so. Thus a successful connection may sometimes require several attempts. If such an attempt to access a file indicates an error, the information can sometimes still be accessed by truncating the URL address to access a directory at the site.

Last Updated: 07/10/2014

While I was the Library of Congress site today I encountered this set of law guides and thought they might be of interest. Updated in July of this year so most of the links should still work.

October 16, 2014

Free Public Access to Federal Materials on Guide to Law Online [Browsing, No Search]

Filed under: Government,Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 6:18 pm

Free Public Access to Federal Materials on Guide to Law Online by Donna Sokol.

From the post:

Through an agreement with the Library of Congress, the publisher William S. Hein & Co., Inc. has generously allowed the Law Library of Congress to offer free online access to historical U.S. legal materials from HeinOnline. These titles are available through the Library’s web portal, Guide to Law Online: U.S. Federal, and include:

I should be happy but then I read:

These collections are browseable. For example, to locate the 1982 version of the Bankruptcy code in Title 11 of the U.S. Code you could select the year (1982) and then Title number (11) to retrieve the material. (emphasis added)

Err, actually it should say: These collections are browseable only. No search within or across the collections.

Here is an example:

sumpreme court default listing

If you expand volume 542 you will see:

supreme court volume 542

Look! There is Intell vs. ADM, let’s look at that one!

Intel vs. ADM download page

Did I just overlook a search box?

I checked the others and you can to.

I did find one that was small enough (less than 20 pages I suppose) to have a search function:

CFR General Provisions image

So, let’s search for something that ought to be in the CFR general provisions, like “department:”

Department in search box

The result?

search error

Actually that is an abbreviation of the error message. Waste of space to show more.

To summarize, the Library of Congress has arranged for all of us to have browseable access but no search to:

  • United States Code 1925-1988 (includes content up to 1993)
    • From Guide to Law Online: United States Law
  • United States Reports v. 1-542 (1754-2004)
    • From Guide to Law Online: United States Judiciary
  • Code of Federal Regulations (1938-1995)
    • From Guide to Law Online: Executive
  • Federal Register v. 1-58 (1936-1993)
    • From Guide to Law Online: Executive

Hundreds of thousands of pages of some of the most complex documents in history and no searching.

If that’s helping us, I don’t think we can afford much more help from the Library of Congress. That’s a hard thing for me to say because in the vast number of cases I really like and support the Library of Congress (aside from the robber baron refugees holed up on the Copyright Office).

Just so I don’t end on a negative note, I have a suggestion to correct this situation:

Give Thompson-Reuters (I knew them as West Publishing Company) or LexisNexis a call. Either one is capable of a better solution than you have with William S. Hein & Co., Inc. Either one has “related” products it could tastefully suggest along with search results.

September 7, 2014

Coding for Lawyers

Filed under: Law,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 4:14 pm

Coding for Lawyers by V. David Zvenyach.

From the FAQ:

What? Lawyers and Coding?

It’s true. Lawyers can code. In fact, if you’re a lawyer, the truth is that it’s easier than you think. I am a lawyer, and a coder.1 In the course of two years, I have gone from knowing essentially nothing to being a decent coder in several languages. This book is intended to drastically shorten that time for others who, like me, decide that they want to learn to code.

You have heard about all the public access to the law projects that are putting encouraging people to determine their own legal rights by reading primary legal texts.

Now we have a lawyer who is striking back at the technical elite by teaching lawyers to code.

Turnabout if fair play I suppose. 😉

I suspect that professions, like lawyers, have learning experiences and styles that are not common to all groups. For example, the first chapter in this book starts off with regexes and uses case citations as an example for a regex. I rather doubt most introductory computer books would take that approach. But to a lawyer, comprehension is immediate and obvious. The terminology has changed but a lawyer knows instinctively how to parse such expressions.

If you are a lawyer or know any lawyers, this is a project to follow. In part simply to learn coding but also to see where one approach used domain specific examples for teaching coding.

I first saw this in a tweet by Adam Ziegler.

August 25, 2014

An Introduction to Congress.gov

Filed under: Law,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 4:50 pm

An Introduction to Congress.gov by Robert Brammer.

From the post:

Barbara Bavis, Ashley Sundin, and I are happy to bring you an introduction to Congress.gov. This video provides a brief explanation of how to use the new features in the latest release, such as accounts, saved searches, member remarks in the Congressional Record, and executive nominations. If you would like more in-depth training on Congress.gov, we hold bi-monthly webinars that are free and available to the public. Our next webinar is scheduled from 2-3 p.m. on September 25, 2014, and you can sign up for it on Law.gov. Do you have an opinion on Congress.gov that you would like to share with us, such as new features that you would like to see added to the site? Please let us know by completing the following survey. Also, if there is something you would like us to cover in a future video, please leave us a comment below.

There are mid-term elections this year (2014) and information on current members of Congress will be widely sought.

The video is only twenty (20) minutes but will help you quickly search a variety of information concerning Congress.

Take special note that once you discover information, the system does not bundle it together for the next searcher.

July 31, 2014

Security Thunderstorm in the Cloud

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Law,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 7:05 pm

Your data security, in the cloud and elsewhere, got weaker today.

U.S District Judge Loretta Preska ruled today that Microsoft must turn over a customer’s emails that are stored in Ireland. (see: U.S. Judge Rules Microsoft Must Produce Emails Held Abroad)

Whether your data is stored in the U.S. or controlled by a U.S. company, it is subject to seizure under by the U.S.

The ruling has been stayed pending an appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Digital Constitution (MS) has a great set of resources on this issue:

Along with briefs filed by others:

More resources and news will appear at the Digital Constitution so sign up for updates!

The legal dancing in the briefs may not interest you but the bottom line is this:

If data can be seized by any government without regard to the location of the data, the Cloud is effectively dead for anyone concerned about data security.

You may store your data in the Cloud on European servers due to greater privacy protection by the EU. Not a concern for U.S. courts if your data is held by a U.S. company.

You may store your data in the Cloud on U.S. servers but if the Chinese government wants to seize it, Judge Preska appears to think that is ok.

Congress needs to quell this security thunderstorm in the Cloud before it does major economic damage both here and abroad.

PS: Many thanks to Joseph Palazzolo (WSJ) for pointing me to the Digital Constitution site.

July 27, 2014

Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information

Filed under: Law,Metadata — Patrick Durusau @ 3:36 pm

Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information by Jeffrey Pomerantz.

Coursera course described in part as follows:

If you use nearly any digital technology, you make use of metadata. Use an ATM today? You interacted with metadata about your account. Searched for songs in iTunes or Spotify? You used metadata about those songs. We use and even create metadata constantly, but we rarely realize it. Metadata — or data about data — describes real and digital objects, so that those objects may be organized now and found later.

Metadata is a tool that enables the information age functions performed by humans as well as those performed by computers. Metadata is important to many fields, particularly Computer Science; but this course is not purely a Computer Science course. This course approaches Metadata from the perspective of Information Science, which is a broad interdisciplinary field that studies how people create and manage information.

Course Syllabus

Unit 1: Organizing Information
Unit 2: Dublin Core
Unit 3: How to Build a Metadata Schema
Unit 4: Alphabet Soup: Metadata Schemas That You (Will) Know and Love
Unit 5: Metadata for the Web
Unit 6: Metadata for Networks
Unit 7: How to Create Metadata
Unit 8: How to Evaluate Metadata
…

An eight week course, July 14 – September 8, 2014, at 4 to 6 hours per week.

I first saw this in a tweet by Aaron Kirschenfeld that reads:

Every one of your legal hackers out there: where’s the metadata? Please learn from @jpom #metadatamooc on @coursera. My brain is crackling.

My follow-up question being: Where are the subject identifications to help map between heterogeneous metadata systems? 😉

July 4, 2014

The Restatement Project

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Text Mining — Patrick Durusau @ 4:15 pm

Rough Consensus, Running Standards: The Restatement Project by Jason Boehmig, Tim Hwang, and Paul Sawaya.

From part 3:

Supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund, Restatement is a simple, rough-and-ready system which automatically parses legal text into a basic machine-readable JSON format. It has also been released under the permissive terms of the MIT License, to encourage active experimentation and implementation.

The concept is to develop an easily-extensible system which parses through legal text and looks for some common features to render into a standard format. Our general design principle in developing the parser was to begin with only the most simple features common to nearly all legal documents. This includes the parsing of headers, section information, and “blanks” for inputs in legal documents like contracts. As a demonstration of the potential application of Restatement, we’re also designing a viewer that takes documents rendered in the Restatement format and displays them in a simple, beautiful, web-readable version.

I skipped the sections justifying the project because in my circles, the need for text mining is presumed and the interesting questions are about the text and/or the techniques for mining.

As you might suspect, I have my doubts about using JSON for legal texts but for a first cut, let’s hope the project is successful. There is always time to convert to a more robust format at some later point, in response to a particular need.

Definitely a project to watch or assist if you are considering creating a domain specific conversion editor.

June 15, 2014

What You Thought The Supreme Court…

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics,Subject Identity — Patrick Durusau @ 3:45 pm

Clever piece of code exposes hidden changes to Supreme Court opinions by Jeff John Roberts.

From the post:

Supreme Court opinions are the law of the land, and so it’s a problem when the Justices change the words of the decisions without telling anyone. This happens on a regular basis, but fortunately a lawyer in Washington appears to have just found a solution.

The issue, as Adam Liptak explained in the New York Times, is that original statements by the Justices about everything from EPA policy to American Jewish communities, are disappearing from decisions — and being replaced by new language that says something entirely different. As you can imagine, this is a problem for lawyers, scholars, journalists and everyone else who relies on Supreme Court opinions.

Until now, the only way to detect when a decision has been altered is a pain-staking comparison of earlier and later copies — provided, of course, that someone knew a decision had been changed in the first place. Thanks to a simple Twitter tool, the process may become much easier.

See Jeff’s post for more details, including a twitter account to follow the discovery of changes in opinions in the opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States.

In a nutshell, the court issues “slip” opinions in cases they decide and then later, sometimes years later, they provide a small group of publishers of their opinions with changes to be made to those opinions.

Which means the opinion you read as a “slip” opinion or in an advance sheet (paper back issue that is followed by a hard copy volume combining one or more advance sheets), may not be the opinion of record down the road.

Two questions occur to me immediately:

  1. We can distinguish the “slip” opinion version of an opinion from the “final” published opinion, but how do we distinguish a “final” published decision from a later “more final” published decision? Given the stakes at hand in proceedings before the Supreme Court, certainty about the prior opinions of the Court is very important.
  2. While the Supreme Court always gets most of the attention, it occurs to me that the same process of silent correction has been going on for other courts with published opinions, such as the United States Courts of Appeal and the United States District Courts. Perhaps for the last century or more.

    Which makes it only a small step to ask about state supreme courts and their courts of appeal. What is their record on silent correction of opinions?

There are mechanical difficulties the older records become because the “slip” opinions may be lost to history but in terms of volume, that would certainly be a “big data” project for legal informatics. To discover and document the behavior of courts over time with regard to silent correction of opinions.

What you thought the Supreme Court said may not be what our current record reflects. Who wins? What you heard or what a silently corrected record reports?

May 27, 2014

A crowdsourcing approach to building a legal ontology from text

Filed under: Law,Legal Informatics,Ontology — Patrick Durusau @ 6:52 pm

A crowdsourcing approach to building a legal ontology from text by Anatoly P. Getman and Volodymyr V. Karasiuk.

Abstract:

This article focuses on the problems of application of artificial intelligence to represent legal knowledge. The volume of legal knowledge used in practice is unusually large, and therefore the ontological knowledge representation is proposed to be used for semantic analysis, presentation and use of common vocabulary, and knowledge integration of problem domain. At the same time some features of legal knowledge representation in Ukraine have been taken into account. The software package has been developed to work with the ontology. The main features of the program complex, which has a Web-based interface and supports multi-user filling of the knowledge base, have been described. The crowdsourcing method is due to be used for filling the knowledge base of legal information. The success of this method is explained by the self-organization principle of information. However, as a result of such collective work a number of errors are identified, which are distributed throughout the structure of the ontology. The results of application of this program complex are discussed in the end of the article and the ways of improvement of the considered technique are planned.

Curious how you would compare this attempt to extract an ontology from legal texts to the efforts in the 1960’s and 1970’s to extract logic from the United States Internal Revenue Code? Apologies but my undergraduate notes aren’t accessible so I can’t give you article titles and citations.

If you do dig out some of that literature, pointers would be appreciated. As I recall, capturing the “logic” of those passages was fraught with difficulty.

April 20, 2014

Annotating, Extracting, and Linking Legal Information

Filed under: Annotation,Extraction,Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics,Linked Data — Patrick Durusau @ 3:59 pm

Annotating, Extracting, and Linking Legal Information by Adam Wyner. (slides)

Great slides, provided you have enough background in the area to fill in the gaps.

I first saw this at: Wyner: Annotating, Extracting, and Linking Legal Information, which has collected up the links/resources mentioned in the slides.

Despite decades of electronic efforts and several centuries of manual effort before that, legal information retrieval remains an open challenge.

April 11, 2014

Definitions Extractions from the Code of Federal Regulations

Filed under: Extraction,Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 7:03 pm

Definitions Extractions from the Code of Federal Regulations by Mohamma M. AL Asswad, Deepthi Rajagopalan, and Neha Kulkarni. (poster)

From a description of the project:

Imagine you’re opening a new business that uses water in the production cycle. If you want to know what federal regulations apply to you, you might do a Google search that leads to the Code of Federal Regulations. But that’s where it gets complicated, because the law contains hundreds of regulations involving water that are difficult to narrow down. (The CFR alone contains 13898 references to water.) For example, water may be defined one way when referring to a drinkable liquid and another when defined as an emission from a manufacturing facility. If the regulation says your water must maintain a certain level of purity, to which water are they referring? Definitions are the building blocks of the law, and yet pouring through them to find what applies to you is frustrating to an average business owner. Computer automation might help, but how can a computer understand exactly what kind of water you’re looking for? We at the Legal Information Institute think this is pretty important challenge, and apparently Google does too.

Looking forward to learning more about this project!

BTW, this is the same Code of Federal Regulations that some members of Congress don’t think needs to be indexed.

Knowing what legal definitions apply is a big step towards making legal material more accessible.

Placement of Citations [Discontinuity and Users]

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 12:53 pm

If the Judge Will Be Reading My Brief on a Screen, Where Should I Place My Citations? by Peter W. Martin.

From the post:

In a prior post I explored how the transformation of case law to linked electronic data undercut Brian Garner’s longstanding argument that judges should place their citations in footnotes. As that post promised, I’ll now turn to Garner’s position as it applies to writing that lawyers prepare for judicial readers.

brief page

Implicitly, Garner’s position assumes a printed page, with footnote calls embedded in the text and the related notes placed at the bottom. In print that entirety is visible at once. The eyes must move, but both call and footnote remain within a single field of vision. Secondly, when the citation sits inert on a printed page and the cited source is online, the decision to inspect that source and when to do so is inevitably influenced by the significant discontinuity that transaction will entail. In print, citation placement contributes little to that discontinuity. The situation is altered – significantly, it seems to me – when a brief or memorandum is submitted electronically and will most likely be read from a screen. In 2014 that is the case with a great deal of litigation.

This is NOT a discussion of interest only to lawyers and judges.

While Peter has framed the issue in terms of contrasting styles of citation, as he also points out, there is a question of “discontinuity” and I would argue comprehension for the reader in these styles.

At first blush, being a regular hypertext maven you may think that inline citations are “the way to go,” on this citation issue.

To some degree I would agree with you but leaving the current display to consult a citation or other material that could appear in a footnote, introduces another form of discontinuity.

You are no longer reading a brief prepared by someone familiar with the law and facts at hand but someone who is relying on different facts and perhaps even a different legal context for their statements.

If you are a regular reader of hypertexts, try writing down the opinion of one author on a note card, follow a hyperlink in that post to another resource, record the second author’s opinion on the same subject on a second note card and then follow a link from the second resource to a third and repeat the note card opinion recording. Set all three cards aside, with no marks to associate them with a particular author.

After two (2) days return to the cards and see if you can distinguish the card you made for the first author from the next two.

Yes, after a very short while you are unable to identify the exact source of information that you were trying to remember. Now imagine that in a legal context where facts and/or law are in dispute. Exactly how much “other” content do you want to display with your inline reference?

The same issue comes up for topic map interfaces. Do you really want to display all the information on a subject or do you want to present the user with a quick overview and enable them to choose greater depth?

Personally I would use citations with pop-ups that contain a summary of the cited authority, with a link to the fuller resource. So a judge could quickly confirm their understanding of a case without waiting for resources to load, etc.

But in any event, how much visual or cognitive discontinuity your interface is inflicting on users is an important issue.

March 25, 2014

Network Analysis and the Law:…

Filed under: Law,Networks — Patrick Durusau @ 7:35 pm

Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court by James H. Fowler, et al.

Abstract:

We construct the complete network of 26,681 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases that cite them from 1791 to 2005. We describe a method for using the patterns in citations within and across cases to create importance scores that identify the most legally relevant precedents in the network of Supreme Court law at any given point in time. Our measures are superior to existing network-based alternatives and, for example, offer information regarding case importance not evident in simple citation counts. We also demonstrate the validity of our measures by showing that they are strongly correlated with the future citation behavior of state courts, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing, we show that network analysis is a viable way of measuring how central a case is to law at the Court and suggest that it can be used to measure other legal concepts.

Danny Bickson pointed this paper out in: Spotlight: Ravel Law – introducing graph analytics to law research.

Interesting paper but remember that models are just that, models. Subsets of a more complex reality.

For example, I don’t know of any models of the Supreme Court (U.S.) that claim to be able to predict The switch in time that saved nine. If you don’t know the story, it makes really interesting reading. I won’t spoil the surprise but you will come away feeling the law is less “fixed” than you may have otherwise thought.

I commend this paper to you but if you need of legal advice, it’s best to consult an attorney and not an model.

February 23, 2014

Accountability in a Computerized Society

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Law,Programming,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 5:46 pm

Accountability in a Computerized Society by Helen Nissenbaum. (The ACM Digital Library reports a publication date of 1997, but otherwise there is no date of publication.)

Abstract:

This essay warns of eroding accountability in computerized societies. It argues that assumptions about computing and features of situations in which computers are produced create barriers to accountability. Drawing on philosophical analyses of moral blame and responsibility, four barriers are identified: (1) the problem of many hands, (2) the problem of bugs, (3) blaming the computer, and (4) software ownership without liability. The paper concludes with ideas on how to reverse this trend.

If a builder has built a house for a man and has not made his work sound, and the house which he has built has fallen down and so caused the death of the householder, that builder shall be put to death.

If it destroys property, he shall replace anything that it has destroyed; and, because he has not made sound the house which he has built and it has fallen down, he shall rebuild the house which has fallen down from his own property.

If a builder has built a house for a man and does not make his work perfect and a wall bulges, that builder shall put that wall into sound condition at his own cost.
—Laws of Hammu-rabi [229, 232, 233]1, circa 2027 B.C.

The leaky bucket style of security detailed in Back to Basics: Beyond Network Hygiene is echoed from this paper from 1997.

Where I disagree with the author is on the need for strict liability in order to reverse the descent into universally insecure computing environments.

Strict liability is typically used when society wants every possible means to be used to prevent damage from a product. Given the insecure habits and nature of software production, strict liability would be grind the software industry to a standstill. Which would be highly undesirable, considering all the buggy software presently in use.

One of the problems that Lindner and Gaycken uncover is a lack of financial incentive to prevent or fix bugs in software.

Some may protest that creating incentives for vendors to fix bugs they created is in some way immoral.

My response would be:

We know lacking incentives results in the bugs continuing to be produced and to remain unfixed. If incentives result in fewer bugs and faster fixes for those that already exists, what is your objection?

What we lack is a model for such incentives. Debating who has the unpaid responsibility for bugs seems pointless. We should be discussing an incentive model to get bugs detected and fixed.

Software vendors will be interested because at present patches and bug fixes are loss centers in their budgets.

Users will be interested because they won’t face routine hammer strikes from script kiddies to mid-level hackers.

The CNO (Computer Network Offense) crowd will be interested because fewer opportunities for script kiddies means more demand for their exceptional exploits.

Like they say, something for everybody.

The one thing no one should want is legislative action on this front. No matter how many legislators you own, the result is going to be bad.

I first saw this in Pete Warden’s Five Short Links for February 21, 2014.

Making the meaning of contracts visible…

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics,Transparency,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 4:27 pm

Making the meaning of contracts visible – Automating contract visualization by Stefania Passera, Helena Haapio, Michael Curtotti.

Abstract:

The paper, co-authored by Passera, Haapio and Curtotti, presents three demos of tools to automatically generate visualizations of selected contract clauses. Our early prototypes include common types of term and termination, payment and liquidated damages clauses. These examples provide proof-of-concept demonstration tools that help contract writers present content in a way readers pay attention to and understand. These results point to the possibility of document assembly engines compiling an entirely new genre of contracts, more user-friendly and transparent for readers and not too challenging to produce for lawyers.

Demo.

Slides.

From slides 2 and 3:

Need for information to be accessible, transparent, clear and easy to understand
   Contracts are no exception.

Benefits of visualization

  • Information encoded explicitly is easier to grasp & share
  • Integrating pictures & text prevents cognitive overload by distributing effort on 2 different processing systems
  • Visual structures and cues act as paralanguage, reducing the possibility of misinterpretation

Sounds like the output from a topic map doesn’t it?

A contract is “explicit and transparent” to a lawyer, but that doesn’t mean everyone reading it sees the contract as “explicit and transparent.”

Making what the lawyer “sees” explicit, in other words, is another identification of the same subject, just a different way to describe it.

What’s refreshing is the recognition that not everyone understands the same description, hence the need for alternative descriptions.

Some additional leads to explore on these authors:

Stefania Passera Homepage with pointers to her work.

Helena Haapio Profile at Lexpert, pointers to her work.

Michael Curtotti – Computational Tools for Reading and Writing Law.

There is a growing interest in making the law transparent to non-lawyers, which is going to require a lot more than “this is the equivalent of that, because I say so.” Particularly for re-use of prior mappings.

Looks like a rapid growth area for topic maps to me.

You?

I first saw this at: Passera, Haapio and Curtotti: Making the meaning of contracts visible – Automating contract visualization.

January 29, 2014

Identifying Case Law

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 4:23 pm

Costs of the (Increasingly) Lengthy Path to U.S. Report Pagination by Peter W. Martin.

If you are not familiar with the U.S. Supreme Court, the thumbnail sketch is that the court publishes its opinions without official page numbers and they remain that way for years. When the final printed version appears, all the cases citing a case without official page numbers, have to be updated. Oh joy! 😉

Peter does a great job illustrating the costs of this approach.

From the post:

On May 17, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided United States v. Comstock, holding that Congress had power under the Necessary and Proper Clause of the U.S. Constitution to authorize civil commitment of a mentally ill, sexually dangerous federal prisoner beyond his release date. (18 U.S.C. § 4248). Three and a half years later, the Court communicated the Comstock decision’s citation pagination with the shipment of the “preliminary print” of Part 1 of volume 560 of the United States Reports. That paperbound publication was logged into the Cornell Law Library on January 3 of this year. (According to the Court’s web site the final bound volume shouldn’t be expected for another year.) United States v. Comstock, appears in that volume at page 126, allowing the full case finally to be cited: United States v. Comstock, 560 U.S. 126 (2010) and specific portions of the majority, concurring and dissenting opinions to be cited by means of official page numbers.

This lag between opinion release and attachment of official volume and page numbers along the slow march to a final bound volume has grown in recent years, most likely as a result of tighter budgets at the Court and the Government Printing Office. Less than two years separated the end of the Court’s term in 2001 and our library’s receipt of the bound volume containing its last decisions. By 2006, five years later, the gap had widened to a full three years. Volume 554 containing the last decisions from the term ending in 2008 didn’t arrive until July 9 of last year. That amounts to nearly five years of delay.

If the printed volumes of the Court’s decisions served solely an archival function, this increasingly tardy path to print would warrant little concern or comment. But because the Court provides no means other than volume and page numbers to cite its decisions and their constituent parts, the increasing delays cast a widening ripple of costs on the federal judiciary, the services that distribute case law, and the many who need to cite it.

The nature of those costs can be illustrated using the Comstock case itself.
…

In addition to detailing the costs of delayed formal citation, Peter’s analysis is equally applicable to multiple gene names, for example, that precede any attempt at an official name.

What happens to all the literature that was published using the “interim” names?

Yes, we can map between them or create synonym tables, but who knows on what basis we created those tables or mappings?

Legal citations aren’t changing rapidly but the fact they are changing at all is fairly remarkable. Taken as lessons in the management of identifiers, it is a area to watch closely.

January 20, 2014

OpenAIRE Legal Study has been published

Filed under: Law,Licensing,Open Access,Open Data,Open Source — Patrick Durusau @ 2:14 pm

OpenAIRE Legal Study has been published

From the post:

Guibault, Lucie; Wiebe, Andreas (Eds) (2013) Safe to be Open: Study on the protection of research data and recommendation for access and usage. The full-text of the book is available (PDF, ca. 2 MB ) under the CC BY 4.0 license. Published by University of Göttingen Press (Copies can be ordered from the publisher’s website)

Any e-infrastructure which primarily relies on harvesting external data sources (e.g. repositories) needs to be fully aware of any legal implications for re-use of this knowledge, and further application by 3rd parties. OpenAIRE’s legal study will put forward recommendations as to applicable licenses that appropriately address scientific data in the context of OpenAIRE.

CAUTION:: Safe to be Open is a EU-centric publication and while very useful in copyright discussions elsewhere, should not be relied upon as legal advice. (That’s not an opinion about relying on it in the EU. Ask local counsel for that advice.)

I say that having witnessed too many licensing discussions that were uninformed by legal counsel. Entertaining to be sure but if I have a copyright question, I will be posing it to counsel who is being paid to be correct.

At least until ignorance of the law becomes an affirmative shield against liability for copyright infringement. 😉

To be sure, I recommend reading of Safe to be Open as a means to become informed about the contours of access and usage of research data in the EU. And possibly a model for solutions in legal systems that lag behind the EU in that regard.

Personally I favor Attribution CC BY because the other CC licenses presume the licensed material was created without unacknowledged/uncompensated contributions from others.

Think of all the people who taught you to read, write, program and all the people whose work you have read, been influenced by, etc. Hopefully you can add to the sum of communal knowledge but it is unfair to claim ownership of the whole of communal knowledge simply because you contributed a small part. (That’s not legal advice either, just my personal opinion.)

Without all the instrument makers, composers, singers, organists, etc. that came before him, Mozart would not the same Mozart that we remember. Just as gifted but without a context to display his gifts.

Patent and copyright need to be recognized as “thumbs on the scale” against development of services and knowledge. That’s where I would start a discussion of copyright and patents.

January 14, 2014

Access to State Supreme Court Data

Filed under: Government,Law,Law - Sources,Transparency — Patrick Durusau @ 10:10 am

Public access to the states’ highest courts: a report card

The post focuses on the Virginia Supreme Court, not surprisingly since it is the Open Virginia Law project.

But it also mentions Public Access to the States’ Highest Courts: A Report Card (PDF), which is a great summary of public access to state (United States) supreme court data. With hyperlinks to relevant resources.

The report card will definitely be of interest to law students, researchers, librarians, lawyers and even members of the public.

In addition to being a quick synopsis for public policy discussions, it makes a great hand list of state court resources.

An earlier blog post pointed out that the Virginia Supreme Court is now posting audio recordings of oral arguments.

Could be test data for speech recognition and other NLP tasks or used if you are simply short of white noise. 😉

December 30, 2013

Is Link Rot Destroying Stare Decisis…

Filed under: Citation Analysis,Citation Practices,Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 5:26 pm

Is Link Rot Destroying Stare Decisis as We Know It? The Internet-Citation Practice of the Texas Appellate Courts by Arturo Torres (Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, Vol 13, No. 2, Fall 2012 )

Abstract:

In 1995 the first Internet-based citation was used in a federal court opinion. In 1996, a state appellate court followed suit; one month later, a member of the United States Supreme Court cited to the Internet; finally, in 1998 a Texas appellate court cited to the Internet in one of its opinions. In less than twenty years, it has become common to find appellate courts citing to Internet-based resources in opinions. Because of the current extent of Internet-citation practice varies by courts across jurisdictions, this paper will examine the Internet-citation practice of the Texas Appellate courts since 1998. Specifically, this study surveys the 1998 to 2011 published opinions of the Texas appellate courts and describes their Internet-citation practice.

A study that confirms what was found in …Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations for the Harvard Law Review and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Curious that a West Key Numbers remain viable after more than a century of use (manual or electronic resolution) whereas Internet citations expire over the course of a few years.

What do you think is the difference in those citations, West Key Numbers versus URLs, that accounts for one being viable and the other only ephemerally so?

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