Statistics on the length and linguistic complexity of bills
From the post:
Where would you go to find out what the longest bill of the 112th Congress was by number of sections (H. R. 1473)? How about by number of unique words (H.R. 3671)? What about by Flesh-Kincaid reading level (S. 475)?
The reading level scores make me doubt that members of Congress have written any of the legislation.
Tauberer on Open Legislative Data
From the post:
Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack and POPVOX has posted his House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference presentation, entitled “Data Impact and Understandability”: click here for the text; click here for the slides.
See the post for more resources from the conference and other materials.
Video and Other Resources Available for House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference
From the post:
Video is now available for the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, held 2 February 2012, in Washington, DC. The conference was hosted by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on House Administration.
Click here for slides from some of the presentations (scroll down).
The Twitter hashtag for the conference was #ldtc.
Presentations concerned metadata and dissemination standards and practices for U.S. federal legislative data, including open government data standards, XML markup, integrating multimedia resources into legislative data, and standards for evaluating the transparency of U.S. federal legislative data.
Interesting source of information on legislative data.
The Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory at Harvard Law School
The “Stuff We’re Looking At” sidebar is of particular interest. A wide range of resources and projects that may be of interest.
Any similar library labs/resources that you would suggest?
BTW, The Molecule of Data by Karen Coyle raises a number of points that I think are highly contestable if not provably wrong.
Take a listen and see what you think. I will be posting specific comments this coming week.
From Information to Knowledge: On Line Access to Legal Information
Collection of pointers to slides, abstracts and some papers on access to legal information, including classification, ontologies, reports on experiences with current systems, etc.
Focused on Europe and “open access” to legal materials.
Maybe useful background information for discussions about topic map and legal materials.
Content Analysis by Michael Heise.
From the post:
Dan Katz (MSU) let me know about a beta release of new website, Legal Language Explorer, that will likely interest anyone who does content analysis as well as those looking for a neat (and, according to Jason Mazzone, addictive) toy to burn some time. The site, according to Dan, allows users: “the chance [free of charge] to search the history of the United States Supreme Court (1791-2005) for any phrase and get a frequency plot and the full text case results for that phrase.” Dan also reports that the developers hope to expand coverage beyond Supreme Court decisions in the future.
The site needs a For Amusement Only sticker. Legal language changes over time and probably no place more so than in Supreme Court decisions.
It was a standing joke in law school that the bar association sponsored the “Avoid Probate” sort of books. If you really want to incur legal fees, just try self-help. Same is true for this site. Use it to argue with your friends, settle bets during football games, etc. Don’t rely on it during night time, road side encounters with folks carrying weapons and radios to summons help. (police)
CALI – eBooks for Legal Education
CALI is a center for projects to make legal materials freely available.
A recent example would be the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence in free ebook form.
All three of which could be mapped into current case law streams, or other topic map type projects.
If you are interested in law and topic map type projects, CALI would be a good starting point for inquiries into what is needed the most.
PS: If you can, please join CALI to support their work.
Another example of imaginative use of technology to interest people in what is often seen as “boring” material. Supreme court cases have outcomes that have impacts on real people. I haven’t played but suspect participant gain a lot of knowledge about the facts and law in each case.
Not to mention that there are monthly drawings for $200 Amazon gift certificates. See the site for details.
From the about page:
FantasySCOTUS is the Internet’s Premier Supreme Court Fantasy League. Last year, over 5,000 attorneys, law students, and other avid Supreme Court followers made predictions about all cases that the Supreme Court decided. On average, members of the league correctly predicted the cases nearly 60% of the time, and accurately predicted that Elena Kagan would be nominated as the 100th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Justin Donoho, who received the highest score out of 5,000+ members, was nominated and confirmed as the inaugural Chief Justice of FantasySCOTUS.
FantasySCOTUS is brought to you by the Harlan Institute. The Harlan Institute’s mission is to bring a stylized law school experience into the high school classroom to ensure that our next generation of leaders has a proper understanding of our most fundamental laws. By utilizing the expertise of leading legal scholars and the interactivity of online games, Harlan will introduce students to our Constitution, the cases of the United States Supreme Court, and our system of justice. Harlan’s long term strategic goal is to develop condensed law school courses that can be taught at no cost in high schools across the country using engaging online programs.
This and the Crowdsourcing Scientific Research I mentioned yesterday make me think that perhaps TREC in 2012 should have a crowdsourced component. Where the data set is available over the WWW and interfaces are proposed and tested to interest the general public in participating. What was that they said about all bugs being shallow if you just had enough eyes?
Up to now, TREC has had a small set of eyes with very powerful machines and algorithms. Would be interesting to see what a crowd, plus imaginative interface and fast interaction could do? Could be a path towards a distributed knowledge economy where users log onto tasks/interfaces that interest them.
An update from the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory:
I spent the week working on LibraryCloud News (a project that Jeff, David, and I have been batting around for a while). We hope LibraryCloud News will become the Hacker News for library dorks (instead of startup dorks). It’s a place where you can submit questions or a link to the community and then engage the community through comment-style discussion. (Exactly the way Reddit and Hacker News work) LibaryCloud News is powered by the same code that powers Hacker News and is humming along in the Amazon Cloud. If you’re interested, we’d love to have you help us beta test LibraryCloud News at http://news.librarycloud.org/
OK, so I have a weakness for libraries and law libraries in particular. 😉
Still, I think this is a promising development and should be encouraged.
Now imagine harvesting the stories from this as a feed and mapping in related resources so people pursuing the stories have related technology, users and vendors with them. Beats the hell out of ads anyday.
Science Manual for Judges Updated by Evan Koblentz
From the post:
A new guidebook for judges and legal professionals, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, became available Wednesday, replacing the previous edition published in 2000.
The 1,038-page manual explains scientific concepts, shows how evidence can be manipulated, and cites judicial decisions. It’s free for downloading and online reading, and there is a $79.95 paperback version.
“The new manual was developed in collaboration with the Federal Judicial Center, which produced the previous editions, and was rigorously peer-reviewed in accordance with the procedures of the National Research Council,” both organizations explained in a public statement. “The reference manual is intended to assist judges with the management of cases involving complex scientific and technical evidence; it is not intended, however, to instruct judges on what evidence should be admissible.”
Although intended for judges, the manual is useful for anyone in the legal community, its authors stated. It contains an introduction by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer and new chapters about forensic science, mental health, and neuroscience — but not computer science.
“We entertained a chapter on computer technology and unfortunately the language of the chapter was too complex, at least as evaluated by our committee, and we thought that by the time the chapter came in, it was really too late to engage another author in the development of the chapter,” said committee co-chair Jerome Kassirer, professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine, in a public conference to announce the manual.
Well, that leaves a gaping hole for someone to plug for judges and other legal professionals.
Need to run reading level software on the current text and cycle a reading level checker over prose as it was being written.
To illustrate the usefulness of topic maps, add in references to cases where some aspect of computer technology has been discussed or is the subject of litigation. Particularly where terminology has changed. Include illustrations that a judge can use to demonstrate their understanding of the technology.
Free access to all members of the judiciary and their staffs to a dynamically updated publication (no dead tree models) that presents summaries of any changes (don’t have to hunt for them). All others by subscription.
The Free Law Reporter – Open Access to the Law and Beyond
From the post:
Like many projects, the Free Law Reporter (FLR) started out as way to scratch an itch for ourselves. As a publisher of legal education materials and developer of legal education resources, CALI finds itself doing things with the text of the law all the time. Our open casebook project, eLangdell, is the most obvious example.
The theme of the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing was “Rip, Mix, Learn” and first introduced the idea of open access casebooks and what later became the eLangdell project. At the keynote talk I laid out a path to open access electronic casebooks using public domain case law as a starting point. On the ebook front, I was a couple of years early.
The basic idea was that casebooks were made up of cases (mostly) and that it was a fairly obvious idea to give the full text of cases to law faculty so that they could write their own casebooks and deliver them to their students electronically via the Web or as PDF files. This was before the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad legitimized the ebook marketplace.
The Free Law Reporter is currently working on a Solr-based application to handle searching of all the case law they publish.
It has always seemed to me that the law is one of those areas that just crys out for the use of topic maps. The main problem being finding territory that isn’t already mostly occupied with current solutions. Such as linking law to case files (done). Linking depositions together and firms to do the encoding/indexing (done). Linking work to billing department (probably came first).
Sharing data/legal analysis? Across systems? That might be of interest in public interest or large class action suits.
Malmgren: Towards a Theory of Jurisprudential Relevance Ranking – Using Link Analysis on EU Case Law
From the post:
Staffan Malmgren of Stockholm University and the free access to law service of Sweden, lagen.nu, has posted his Master’s thesis, Towards a Theory of Jurisprudential Relevance Ranking – Using Link Analysis on EU Case Law (2011). Here is the abstract:
Staffan is going to be posting his thesis a chapter at a time to solicit feedback on it.
Any takers?
Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM)
From the webpage:
EDRM develops guidelines, sets standards and delivers resources to help e-discovery consumers and providers improve quality and reduce costs associated with e-discovery
EDRM consists of 9 projects, each designed to help reach those goals:
Data Set, Evergreen, IGRM (Information Governance Reference Model), Jobs, Metrics, Model Code of Conduct, Search, Testing, XML.
Definitely on your radar if you are working on topic maps and legal discovery.
I will be returning to the projects to treat them individually. The “Data Set” project alone may take longer than my usual post to simply summarize.
Vendor sponsored site but looks like a fairly rich collection of links to e-discovery (law/legal) materials.
Legal Ontology Engineering Methodologies, Modelling Trends, and the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge by Dr. Núria Casellas.
Publisher’s description (from Legal Informatics:
Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed.
During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments.
This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.
Well, it is the sort of thing that I would enjoy as leisure reading. 😉
I keep threatening to get one of the personal research accounts just to see how much or how little progress has been made by legal information vendors. Haven’t yet but maybe I can find a sponsor for a project to undertake such a comparison.
Bennett Launches Site on citeproc-js Legal Citation Features
From the post:
Professor Frank Bennett of the Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has launched CitationStylist, a new Website that provides information and tools related to the legal citation “features of the citeproc-js citation formatter.”
The CitationStlist site styles are based on “Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (Columbia Law Review Ass’n et al. eds., 19th ed. 2010).” Styles used in the United States and courts therein.
US based legal topic maps will be using those styles for presentation of legal citations so this will be a very valuable tool.
Does anyone know of an equivalent tool for non-US citations?
Sartor et al. on Legislative XML for the Semantic Web from the Legalinformatics Blog.
Legislative XML for the Semantic Web: Principles, Models, Standards for Document Management (Springer 2011), a collection of scholarly articles on the use of XML and Semantic Web technologies in connection with legislative information systems, has been published.
Should be of interest for anyone working on topic maps and legislative information systems.
LC Name Authority File Available as Linked Data
From Legal Informatics Blog:
The Library of Congress has made available the LC Name Authority File as Linked Data.
The data are available in several formats, including RDF/XML, N-Triples, and JSON.
Of particular interest to the legal informatics community is the fact that the Linked Data version of the LC Name Authority File includes records for names of very large numbers of government entities — as well as of other kinds of organizations, such as corporations, and individuals — of the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, India, and many other nations. The file also includes many records for individual statutes.
Interesting post that focuses on law related authority records.
The Information Explosion and a Great Article by Grossman and Cormack on Legal Search
A discussion the “information explosion” and review of Technology-Assisted Review in E-Discovery Can Be More Effective and More Efficient Than Exhaustive Manual Review, Richmond Journal of Law and Technology
See what you think but I don’t read the article as debunking exhaustive manual review (by humans) so much as introducing technology to make human reviewers more effective.
Still human review, but assisted by technology to leverage it for large document collections.
As the article notes, the jury (sorry!) is still out on what assisted search methods work the best. This is an area where human recognition of subjects and recording that recognition for others, such as the use of different names for parties to litigation, would be quite useful. I would record that recognition using topic maps, but that isn’t surprising.
From the announcement:
…Relativity Analytics powers functionality such as clustering, the automatic grouping of documents by similar concepts, as well as concept search, and the ability for end users to train the system to group documents based on concepts and issues they define.
Relativity is being deployed in EOUSA’s Litigation Technology Service Center (LTSC) to provide electronic discovery services for all U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, which include over 6,000 attorneys nationwide. EOUSA will use Relativity Analytics to empower U.S. Attorney teams to do more with limited resources by allowing them to quickly locate key documents and increase their review speeds through enormous data sets in compressed time frames.
I like the training the system to group documents idea. Not that far from interactive merging based on user criteria. Would be more useful to colleagues if portions of documents could be grouped, so they don’t have to wade through documents for the relevant bits.
There is a lot of e-discovery management software on the market but two quick points:
1) The bar for good software goes up every year, and,
2) Topic maps have unique features that could make them players in this ever expanding market.
New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference (NELIC)
From the post:
The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference (NELIC) was held April 15, 2011 at Berkeley Law School in Berkeley, CA. It brought together the lawyers, entrepreneurs, and technologists who are working to build the next biggest disruptive technologies in the legal industry.
The aim of the conference was to provide a meeting point for a deep and substantive discussion about the long-term impact of these technologies, and how they might come to be broadly adapted in the industry as a whole. It tackled the topics of quantitative legal prediction, legal automation, legal finance, the design of user-facing interfaces that make it possible for laypeople to manage the law, and startups in the legal industry.
The entire conference is available on videos.
Looks like a good resource for finding places where topic maps would make a substantive contribution.
Building a better legal search engine, part 1: Searching the U.S. Code
From the post:
As I mentioned last week, I’m excited to give a keynote in two weeks on Law and Computation at the University of Houston Law Center alongside Stephen Wolfram, Carl Malamud, Seth Chandler, and my buddy Dan from CLS. The first part in my blog series leading up to this talk will focus on indexing and searching the U.S. Code with structured, public domain data and open source software.
He closes with:
Stay tuned next week for the next part in the series. I’ll be using Apache Mahout to build an intelligent recommender system and cluster the sections of the Code.
It won’t pull the same audience share as the “Who shot J.R.?” episode of Dallas, but I have to admit I’m interested in the next part of this series. 😉
CS 533: Natural Language Processing
Don’t be mis-led by the title! This isn’t just another NLP course.
From the Legal Informatics Blog:
Professor Dr. L. Thorne McCarty of the Rutgers University Department of Computer Science has posted lecture videos and other materials in connection with his recent graduate course on Natural Language Processing. The course uses examples from a judicial decision: Carter v. Exxon Company USA, 177 F.3d 197 (3d Cir. 1999).
From Professor McCarty’s post on LinkedIn:
To access most of the files, you will need the username: cs533 and the password: shrdlu. To access the videos, use the same password: shrdlu. Comments are welcome!
NLP and legal materials? Now there is a winning combination!
I must confess that years of practicing law and even now continuing to read legal materials in some areas may be influencing my estimate of the appeal of this course. 😉 I will watch the lectures and get back to you.
Collection of sites, blogs, resources, etc., for legal research.
I wasn’t surprised by its U.S. centric offerings until I saw that it also offered fair coverage of Latin and South America.
What happened to European countries, the EU, Africa, Asia, etc.?
If anyone knows of legal resource collections for other countries or regions, I would like to report them here.
Legal Informatics is the companion blog to Robert Richard’s LEGAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS & LEGAL INFORMATICS RESOURCES
Make this blog a regular stop if you are interested in legal informatics.
LII/Legal Information Institute is an effort to make US and world law freely accessible.
Managed subject identity will be valuable in navigation of primary and secondary legal materials, binding of those materials to case specific content and mining of legal discovery materials.
For mapping primary legal materials, this is the place to start.
Questions:
Please also consider contributing either funds or expertise to support this project.
LEGAL INFORMATION SYSTEM & LEGAL INFORMATICS RESOURCES is a one stop bibliography for all things related to legal informatics.
Just casting about you will find a list of blogs on legal informatics, data sets for testing your topic map authoring/mining tools, knowledge representation (ontologies) for legal materials, user studies about actual information systems and more.
it would be easy to loose an afternoon just exploring the listings of resources here, to say nothing of following each one of those listings.
Questions:
From the blog:
VoxPopuLII is a guest-blogging project sponsored by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School. It presents the insights of a the very diverse group of people working on legal informatics issues and government information, all around the world. It emphasizes new voices and big ideas.
Not your average blog.
I first encountered: LexML Brazil Project
Questions (about LexML):
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