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Law as an app - technology in legal education

Applications, Disruptive legal technology, Electronic commerce, Innovation in legal technology, legal education, visualization 10 Responses »
Sep 052012

The growing usage of apps meant it was only a matter of time until they would find their way into legal education. Following up on a previously published article on LaaS – Law as a Service, this post discusses different ways that apps can be included into the law degree curriculum.

1 Changing legal education through the use of apps

There are different ways in which apps can be used in legal education in order to better prepare students for the legal profession. In this post we suggest three different possibilities for the usage of apps, reflecting different pedagogical styles and learning outcomes. What each of the suggestions has in common is to bring legal education closer to the real-life work of lawyers.

Through identifying aspects in which we perceive legal education as lacking quality or quantity, we apply and implement these to our suggestions for changed legal education. The aspects we view as lacking are: identifying and managing risks, the interaction between different areas of law, and proactive problem-based learning. To take each of these briefly in turn:

  • managing risks is something that practicing lawyers and other legal service professionals must do on a daily basis. Law is not only about applying legal rules but also about weighing options, estimating possible outcomes and deciding upon which risks to accept. Legal education has not traditionally included this in the curriculum, and students have arguably very little experience of such training in their studies.
  • interaction between different areas of law is often hard to incorporate in legal studies, which follow a block or module structure. Each course provides students with in-depth knowledge of that particular legal area. However, the interaction between such modules is lacking, with teachers often unaware of the content of preceding or succeeding courses. For students, a problem with this module structure can be that they forget the content of a course studied at an earlier stage in their education.
  • problem-based learning is generally encouraged and applied in legal education. However, most problem-based learning (PBL) is reactive, asking students to evaluate the legal consequences of a scenario that has already played out, instead of training students purely in after-the-fact solutions, in other words “clearing up the legal mess.” PBL should be made more proactive, aiming to train students in identifying and counteracting problems before they arise. This can also be viewed as an implementation of the first aspect, managing risks.

In aiming to include these aspects in legal education, we view technology as playing an important role. Perhaps ideally, the whole legal education could be re-structured in order to include such practical aspects that reflect the current legal profession; however, such change is perhaps too complex and viewed as somewhat unnecessary by those who are able to make such changes – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as the saying goes. An app is not necessarily the sole possible implementation method, but it serves as an example of how these aspects can relatively easily be brought within legal education.

The first teaching approach looks at legal aspects of apps themselves, where the apps are viewed as objects within law. Here students are provided with a set problem and are encouraged to consider how different areas of law may apply to the app in question, and how the various areas impact on each other. This approach implements both PBL and the interaction of different legal fields. Proactiveness may also be included by asking students to identify legal risks of the app, and how such risks could by reduced through the use of law.

The second approach brings together technology and law, and is as such a suitable suggestion for inclusion in a legal informatics course, or as part of more general jurisprudence. Students are given the task of developing a legal service app, and thus must implement law through a technological tool. Students must first identify a need for a service within an area of law of their choosing, and then develop an app which provides the service. This approach implements both PBL and proactiveness, and can also require students to consider both legal and technical risks.

The third approach aims to add value to the legal education as a whole, by making available an app to students to be used alongside teaching, complementing the existing education. Students are provided with the opportunity to test their knowledge, and combine different areas of study through interactive learning. Depending on the design of the app, this approach has the possibility of implementing all aspects: PBL, interaction of legal fields, and proactiveness or risk management.

2 Legal aspects of apps

Legal education in many countries around the world is set up as linear blocks of different legal fields and subject areas. As law is often divided into various sub-fields–such as private law, public law, administrative law, environmental law, or information technology law–it appears only natural to discuss and teach the subjects one by one. The amount of material to be learned by the student would otherwise be overwhelming. While in some countries, exams might encompass multiple fields of law, subjects are being taught in a consecutive order.

Though the pedagogical reasons for the linearity in legal education are convincing, some improvements are still possible. One idea that we would like to discuss here are legal aspects of apps that intertwine different legal fields and challenge the students to analyze one particular phenomena from various different legal angles. We are not suggesting any particular fora for this exercise; these might stretch from traditional in-class seminars to online e-learning platforms to a mixture of the two and be included in law school curricula either as compulsory or selective modules.

Apps and information communication technologies, in general, do not adhere to geographical, physical or time related boundaries. They inherently challenge the traditional legal system based on bricks and mortar. In this regard they are, therefore, well-suited for legal analysis.

Another reason to use apps as the object for analysis by students is their popularity among the younger (and older) generation and therefore the close relationship students have to them to start with. As an example, one can compare it to using Facebook when discussing privacy, as opposed to showing a large company’s employee database.

In order to reflect the real-life experience of the exercise even more, the students would be allocated a certain expert area. As at law firms, one student would be an expert in intellectual property rights, another in contract law, another in privacy, international law, consumer rights issues, etc.

The students would –from the perspective of their expert area–firstly investigate possible legal issues with a specific gaming app, for example. They would analyze the application of the rules and norms within their field and identify potential conflicts or loopholes within these rules. Their investigation would include testing the app itself, as well as looking at possible end-user agreements and other applicable contractual agreements between the user, the app store and the developer of the app.

The next step would be to identify and discuss possible overlaps, discrepancies and conflicts between the different areas of law in relation to the app. The exercise should result in a written and/or oral report of the different legal issues involved and solutions to potential conflicts between the law and the app.

Adding another layer of real-life scenario, each group could be asked to present their findings to an imaginative client who is the producer of the app. This simulation would allow the students not only to develop a legal analysis based on correlating fields of law but also to present the analysis to non-lawyers, translating legal jargon into understandable everyday language.

The exercise–analyzing an existing app–very much fits into the idea often conveyed in legal education that law is applied after an incident occurs. In order to add a level of proactivity, students could be asked to analyze an app under production, before it is launched. This would guarantee more proactive thinking by the students asking them to foresee potential conflicts and avoid them, rather than discussing legal issues after they have arisen.

While the exercise as such might not be a revolutionary idea, we think that the increased inclusion of such exercises in legal education would contribute to better preparation of students for their life as young lawyers.

3 Law’s implementation in apps

While the previous exercise fits well within the traditional legal education by asking students to deliver a legal analysis, a topic less discussed in undergraduate legal studies is how to employ technology for delivering law. With a few exceptions, students generally focus on analyzing the law rather than implementing law in technology.Change Priorities

Until several years ago legal analysis was the main business for lawyers, so legal education well reflected the profession. In the last few years, however, legal services delivered via and as technology have increased and opened up a new market for lawyers and legal professionals. This change should be reflected in legal education in order to prepare students for their future.

While the idea is not to replace lawyers with apps or software, an app or another technology could either help lawyers in their working tasks or deliver law as a valuable service for consumers, citizens, companies or organizations. Examples of such apps, both for lawyers and end-users, are mentioned in a post at iinek’s blog and Slaw; shorter lists can be found on iinek’s Delicious page and the iPad4lawyers blog.

In the exercise, students would look at law from a different perspective, i.e. how legal regulations affect the individual or organization. Going away from a linear text approach, students would have to translate law into a format that users or apps can read. In other words, law would have to suit the user/app, and not the other way around. Students would, therefore, have to go beyond text and translate rules into flowcharts, diagrams, mind maps and other visual tools in order for the app to be able to follow the law’s instructions.

Implementing legal rules into technology, therefore, not only encourages students to think proactively but it also motivates them to identify solutions for the application of the law and how rules could be transformed into practice. From a pedagogical point of view the exercise would allow the students to think about different aspects of law beyond the traditional case or contract. It would also encourage a wider viewpoint of law as a tool in society.

Again, how the exercise is included in the curriculum is a matter of taste. Technical assistance is of importance, in order for students to know what aspects to take into account and what schematics developers need in order to be able to create an app. The exercise could be set up as a competition (Georgetown Law School – Iron Tech Lawyer) with an expert jury consisting of practicing lawyers and developers.

4 Legal education as an app

Talking about legal education as an app can have different meanings. While legal apps (for lawyers and individuals) and educational apps are rather common these days, legal educational apps are not so developed, yet.Puzzle

Legal education, as mentioned, is traditionally taught in blocks or modules, with very few references and links between them. This setup clearly has its benefits, not least logistically. There are clear arguments in favor of such an approach; planning and studying becomes easier for teachers and students alike, time limitations mean that implementing an approach that makes connections between each subject is hard. This is where we believe that technology has the potential to play an important role. Technology is not bound to physical classrooms and attendance requirements of students or teachers. It has the ability to be accessed at a time of the student’s choosing, without placing additional demands on instructors.

A legal education app could provide the key in aiding students to make connections between their study areas; it could be made to fit alongside a law degree, assuming a student’s knowledge in sync with their level of study, by including content from both current and past courses. The app would offer an easy way to implement an interactive, problem-based learning approach. It could provide additional content, quizzes, exercises, social media functions etc. complementing the education and enabling a holistic perspective.

Although no teacher-student relationship is required here, clearly pedagogical thinking would need to play a strong role so that a worthwhile learning environment for the individual could be created. Much time and effort would need to be invested in planning, and the application itself would need to be flexible to adjust to different study plans and so forth. Another issue is, of course, who would make the app. As curricula vary from law school to law school, and jurisdiction to jurisdiction, such an app is ideally built by those who know the curriculum. Such “in-house” expertise also means that potential bias from outside factors should be avoided.

Legal apps have already been introduced to help lawyers study for qualifying exams, e.g. BarMax. (These are often, however, still very topic-specific.) Implementing the same kind of thinking at the educational level would start to prepare students for their future workplace, allowing them to be better prepared for helping clients with real-world scenarios dealing with complex and interrelating legal issues. If students begin such thinking at the beginning of their legal studies, it becomes normal, arguably allowing for better educated graduates.

This last approach is perhaps a little future-oriented (although not as much as, for example, grading by technology), and it is of course not easy to implement at the university level; academics must work together with app developers to produce a tool of real value to students. However, even a slimmed-down version of such an app can be a tool for helping students prepare for exams, test their knowledge of legal areas, or simply make sure that they have understood concepts covered in teaching. Some examples of such implementations in legal education are shown here.

5 Conclusions

There is no doubt that apps are the future for legal services. To what extent they will be included in legal education is yet to be decided. Here we have shown three differing approaches that could help in this regard. Implementation of any or all of these would bring in aspects that are currently lacking in legal education.

Rather often discussions on technology and legal education focus on e-learning and online teaching environments. In our opinion, traditional offline exercises and their pedagogical value should not be underestimated, with technology offering an excellent platform as an object, tool or companion during legal education and life as a lawyer.

6 Sources

Christine KirchbergerChristine Kirchberger is a doctoral candidate & lecturer in legal informatics at the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (IRI). Her research focuses on legal information retrieval, the concept of legal information within the framework of the doctrine of legal sources and also examines the information-seeking behaviour of lawyers. Christine blogs at iinek.wordpress.com and can be found as @iinek on Twitter.

Pam StorrPam Storr is a lecturer at the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (IRI), and course director for the Master Programme in Law and Information Technology at Stockholm University. Her main areas of interest are within information technology and intellectual property law. Pam is the editor for IRI’s blog, Blawblaw, and can be found as @pamstorr on Twitter.

 

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

Posted by Kirchberger Christine at 7:26 am

Open data in a librarian hat: What's your Number One?

free access to law, Law.gov, Open Government Data 2 Responses »
Aug 152012

When I started to write a post about THOMAS and its place in open government about three months ago, I was feeling apologetic. I was going make a heavy-handed, literal comparison of the opening hours of the Law Library of Congress (one of the maintainers of THOMAS, and my former employer, whose views are not at all represented here) with open government. I planned to wax sympathetic on the history of THOMAS, and how little has changed since it was first built. But, that post would not have added anything new to the #opengovdata conversation, or really mentioned data at all.

Just over one month ago, #freeTHOMAS reached a fever pitch surrounding the passage of H.R. 5882, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act for FY2013. Just before passage, H.Rpt.511 directed official conversation on open legislative data for the coming fiscal year by saying, “let’s talk.” In a section about the Government Printing Office, the House Appropriations Committee expressed concerns about authentication and open legislative data, but called for a task force “composed of staff representatives of the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, the Clerk of the House, the Government Printing Office, and such other congressional offices as may be necessary,” to look in to the matter.

Opengovdata was disappointed in government. The tone of the House Report suggested that government had been dismissive of opengovdata–and in all fairness, others were beginning to be dismissive of opengovdata as well.

But, a clear classification problem was emerging. Inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s Freedom To Connect speech at the AFI in late May, I had a very librarian moment on organizational hierarchies.

#OpenGov is a really big tent.

People who want a more open environment for government to communicate with the governed want data, increased transparency, plain language legislation, open court filings, access to government funded research, silly walks, etc. Accountability through transparency often dominates the conversation, thanks to well-funded non-profits and high profile projects. However, there’s more to the movement. In that spirit…

Let’s be transparent about transparency.

When the goal of an open government project is legislative transparency through freely accessible data, let’s focus on that. When the goal is something else, let’s focus on that too. We hear about government accountability through data because the voices calling for it are loud. But data can do much more than bring about a more transparent lawmaking process.

In the words of a wise man, make transparency your Number Two.

If you haven’t had the chance to watch this aforementioned Freedom To Connect talk, and you’ve got half an hour to spare, I highly recommend it. The subject is community broadband, but it’s hard not to be inspired to frame other issues smarter, with transparency ever-present in the background.

Let’s focus on Number One.

If the THOMAS data, for example, were open right now, this instant, you couldn’t watch it on TV. You couldn’t read it on your Kindle. It’s mere presence would not increase transparency. Someone would have to do something with it.  Number One is the thing you do with the data to reach your own goal–and that goal might not be legislative transparency.

As a public law librarian to a broad constituency, my goals are different than those of a non-profit think tank, or a law firm, or a law school, or even a non-law public library. In a climate of doing more with less, of needing to show much return for little investment, we each have to frame specific, measurable, achievable Number Ones tailored to the needs of our institutions. Without these Number Ones (goals, mission statements, benchmarks, or whatever management word your organization uses), we flounder off-mission, lose focus, and potentially lose funding.

Librarians are foot soldiers for the First Amendment–we like open information, we place a high value on the freedom to know. However, we’re among the first to be cut in tight budget situations, and we’re all too familiar with the perils of asking for something that’s overly broad, or asking for something that you can’t show narrowly tailored value for later on.

With respect to open gov data: government accountability is not unimportant to me as a voter. However, as a law librarian, I need to focus on Number Ones with more specific, smaller-scale goals than transparency, that will create measurable outcomes, allowing me to show concrete value to my institution. The big picture of how information is available, and the relationship between the government and the governed is important, but it doesn’t always get you funding, and it can’t always answer the question of the patron in front of you.

 What’s your Number One?
There’s plenty of data out there. What are you doing with it? How can you manipulate raw free resources into something good for your institution? There is much to be said for information for the sake of information. I can’t imagine needing to convince most library-types of that. That said, we library-types, we information professionals, we decision makers, and perhaps we citizens need to narrow open gov to make it work for us. Data is good, but a real-time interactive civics education program based on THOMAS data for K-12 students is better. Let transparency folks fight the good fight, and don’t forget their work. But while you’ve got your librarian hat on, focus on a Number One that works for you.

Meg Lulofs is an information professional at large, blogging at librarylulu.com, editing Pimsleur’s Checklists of Basic American Legal Publications, and making mischief. She earned a J.D. from the University of Baltimore, and a M.L.I.S. from Catholic University. She welcomes feedback at meglulofs@gmail.com. You can follow her on Twitter @librarylulu, or on Facebook at facebook.com/librarylulu.

 

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

[Editor's Note] For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see: Nick Holmes, Accessible Law; John Sheridan, Legislation.gov.uk; David Moore, OpenGovernment.org: Researching U.S. State Legislation.

Posted by Lulofs Meg at 10:08 am

Making a legal dictionary for an indigenous language: the Legal Maori Dictionary

Cross-language legal information retrieval, legal dictionaries No Responses »
Jul 102012

In 2010, an interesting observation was made about the linguistic identity of the New Zealand state. The observer was the Waitangi Tribunal of New Zealand, a permanently appointed commission of inquiry tasked with investigating claims of Crown breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi that may have caused prejudice to Māori. Of course the Treaty itself was signed by two distinct parties in 1840: the British Crown, and the representatives of Māori tribal groupings. In 1840 the linguistic, ethnic, and cultural identity of each grouping was simply not in doubt. But over the years the British Crown has devolved or morphed into the Crown in right of New Zealand, British settlers became Pākehā New Zealanders, and the Māori themselves have also changed irrevocably. So the Tribunal’s observationwas interesting:

Fundamentally, there is a need for a mindset shift away from the pervasive assumption that the Crown is Pākehā, English-speaking, and distinct from Māori rather than representative of them.   Increasingly, in the twenty-first century, the Crown is also Māori. If the nation is to move forward, this reality must be grasped.

In short, the Crown, in right of New Zealand, is not only Māori, but must also be Māori speaking. In view of New Zealand’s bicultural (and bilingual) legal history, this is not as merely ‘aspirational’ as might be presumed.

In early 2013, a new dictionary will be published in New Zealand. This dictionary will be a bilingual Māori-English language dictionary. Nothing unusual about that; there are quite a few Māori dictionaries about. Nor is the fact that this particular dictionary is a legal dictionary particularly strange; the world is well served with those, even in regards to New Zealand legal English. The Legal Māori Dictionary is relatively unusual, however, for combining these two characteristics. There are, as yet, not many indigenous language legal dictionaries, or indigenous legal language projects around the world. Of course, there are some fascinating indigenous legal language projects, such as the rich searchable collection of native Hawaiian legal documents available through the Ka Huli Ao Digital Archives under the auspices of the Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawai`ian Law. An extensive Irish Language Legal Terminology derived from the bilingual Acts of the Irish parliament has also been made publicly available. In Australia, some exciting work has been done with identifying legal glossaries in a number of aboriginal languages including Yolngu Matha and Murrinh-Patha from the Northern Territory. Not infrequently, such glossaries and terminologies are the result of dedicated workshops, often government funded, set up in order to create a functional lexicon for use in the state legal system by speakers of the target indigenous language, as in the case of the English-Inuktitut-French Legal Glossary released in 1997 by the Nunavut Translator/Interpreter program at Nunavut Arctic College. An earlier but similar project for the Navajo language was published in 1989 by the US District Court for the District of New Mexico, and is still made publicly available by the Judicial Branch of the Navajo Nation. A more recent example is the extensive Sámi legal terminology that has been worked up over recent years and made available online by translators and interpreters working on the translation of state legal documents into Sámi for Sámi-speaking populations of Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden.

So, we at the Legal Māori Project, and our Legal Māori Dictionary, are in good, if select, company. But every legal lexicography project has a unique whakapapa (genealogy) and characteristics that somehow reflect the lived histories of the people who belong to each language.

To briefly outline our whakapapa then. The Legal Māori Project, as established in 2008 in the Law Faculty of Victoria University of Wellington, seeks to achieve two primary aims: • A long-term goal of normalizing the use of the Māori language within the New Zealand legal system; and ultimately, the public, civic sphere of New Zealand society. Māori must claim its place as an ordinary language of the enactment of state law, of government, administration, politics and the economy; • A shorter-term aim of providing bilingual Māori speakers with a resource that can help such speakers can effectively and feasibly choose to use Māori rather than English in that legal system. Such ease of choice is critically important for effective language revitalisation.

The Legal Māori has received four years of public funding for our research from New Zealand’s Ministry of Science and Innovation. Rather than create a legal terminology from scratch, however, we thought it absolutely necessary to carry out a kind of textual excavation of the rich, but mainly hidden Māori-language documents of New Zealand’s bilingual and bicultural legal history. We were aware that there are several thousand pages of publicly available, printed, Māori language documents discussing, applying, translating, critiquing and interpreting Western legal concepts. These documents are available, but sequestered in public repositories such as the Alexander Turnbull Library. In the face of such a rich treasure trove of texts, we considered our best approach was to be a corpus-based one. We would build a body of digitized Māori language texts that we could analyse to identify the kinds of words and phrases that Māori speakers and writers of the past 180 years had been using in those texts. By June 2011, the texts we found and, in crucial partnership with the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, digitized, totaled 8 million word tokens; the largest purpose-built and structured corpus of Māori language texts known. The pre-1910 texts of the Legal Māori Corpus are publicly available for Maori social security actdownload, with the remainder of the texts to be made available by the end of this year. The Legal Māori Corpus contains printed texts of the following kinds of historical documents, most of which are also available online in the land title system. Some documents might be more accurately described strategic documents issued by government departments in Māori, such as Māori language versions of statements of intent.

These documents taken as a whole provide an incredible opportunity to examine the evolution of an endangered language as it wrestles with the lexicon and conceptual world of the dominant language and that language’s culture. Therefore, the collated texts from the Corpus were examined to find how various words and phrases have been used to express Western legal ideas. Over the past two years we have been identifying those words and phrases; first, to come up with a useful lexicon of possible legal Māori terms, and then, to test and validate those lexicon terms in order choose the terms that are now to form to the base of the Legal Māori Dictionary itself. With the invaluable design, by Dave Moskovitz of ThinkTank Ltd, of an open-source, easy-to-use web-based text browser and dictionary writing system called Freelex, we are now compiling our dictionary entries.

As mentioned above, our purpose has always been to create a dictionary of Māori language terms to express Western legal concepts. Customary Māori legal language had been explored in-depth in other scholarship. For example, customary Māori legal concepts have been investigated by the FRST funded work undertaken by Te Mātāhauāriki Institute based at Waikato University in developing a compendium of customary Māori legal terms: Te Mātāpunenga. Choosing to focus on the expression of Western legal ideas in Māori, however, exposed us to the considerable risk that English meanings and concepts would drive the content of our dictionary. Indeed we expected such English conceptual dominance. However, the pilot stages and subsequent corpus-based work showed that Māori customary legal vocabulary had a far stronger presence in the terms we were identifying than had been expected. In fact, many of the words in te reo Māori (the Māori language) that have been used to describe traditional Māori legal concepts are also terms within legal Māori terminology, communicating Western legal ideas. (Some examples are mana, roughly glossed as ‘authority’; tikanga, or the ‘correct way of doing things’; and rangatiratanga which can be equated to ‘chieftainship’.) The Legal Māori Project then must reflect two very important aspects of legal Māori vocabulary: customary legal meaning and Western legal meaning. A core set of customary legal terms that had acquired further Western legal senses over the past 180 years could in fact be identified within the lexicon of legal terms that were being derived from the corpus itself. In view of this insight, we decided that the idea of identifying a finite set of core customary legal terms could form part of a methodology that would enable Māori ideas and Māori legal thinking, alongside Western legal thinking, to take centre stage in our dictionary generation and formatting. The methodology used by the Legal Māori Project team is one that therefore pays careful attention to both the Western and customary law aspects of a significant, identifiable core of traditional Māori law terms. The team identified that if customary legal and western legal aspects of core terms are accounted for in the selection, formatting, and organisation of the dictionary entries, English glosses and English ideas are less likely to subvert Māori ideas and the Māori language basis of the dictionary as a whole. To provide a practical example of how we attempted to incorporate such prioritization in the design of the Legal Māori Dictionary, the following draft entry for taonga might be useful. It comes from the sample dictionary released in June 2010.

  taonga
  The customary usage of taonga
refers to property or anything
highly prized. The giving and
receiving of taonga was an
important part of recording and
maintaining reciprocal
relationships between groups.
@TM Taonga
  1n <cust> valued property [K]i te
kitea kua kore te tangata e utu i
ngā moni reti, e whai ture ana ki
te hamene i a ia ki te muru i ōna
taonga[.] @S241886
2n goods Kua kitea te nui haere o
ngā mahi o te koroni i runga i te
maha o ngā taonga e utautaina
ana ki tāwahi[.] @S241891 ☼
Usually used in the context of
personal property, but sometimes
also used to refer to real property
or goods traded on a commercial
scale.

 

Many typical dictionary elements have been used in this draft entry. For example, distinct verb senses have been identified and numbered. The grammatical function of each sense is identified, and the primary usage (here referring to taonga being primarily a customary term) identified. It also includes a one-word English gloss for each sense and some further explanation in English of how the term is used in a technical way (preceded by ☼). Finally, the entry includes a usage example for each term and short code references for each example, which will enable the user to find the original text. The opening sentence at the top of the entry will be shaded in its final printed form, and will thereby be a new addition to the formatting of our dictionary articles. We have labeled this feature the whakamaramatanga (‘clarification’) field, where a very brief explanation is given of the all-important customary context for the term with a reference to further reading for those readers wanting to find out more about the concept. The reference is to the Matapunenga compendium (to be published at roughly at the same time as the Legal Māori Dictionary). These small additions to the traditional dictionary entry, must be taken in conjunction with all the work carried out by the Legal Māori Project to date. Ultimately we hope that our experience in designing and producing our outputs, including the dictionary, might assist the designers of other specialist dictionaries or lexicons of indigenous languages to pay appropriate deference to the customary concepts of those languages, where possible and practicable.

And, above all, just maybe our work will help Māori speakers to choose to use their own language in precisely those domains where they are simply not expected to, or in the view of some, supposed to. And when that happens, a Māori-speaking Crown doesn’t seem so difficult after all.

Thanks to Māori.org.nz for the Māori images used here.

After some years working in the New Zealand Department of Corrections and Māori broadcasting, Māmari completed an MA (Distinction) in Classical Studies, BA (Hons), and an LLB (Hons) at Victoria University. She then spent three and a half years at New Zealand’s largest law firm, Russell McVeagh, in Wellington, working in the Māori legal team in the Corporate Advisory Group. Māmari has been with the School of Law since January 2006 and, with Assistant Professor Mary Boyce of the University of Hawai’i, runs the Legal Māori Project. Her primary research interests are law and language, Māori and the New Zealand legal system, and social security law. Māmari is married to Maynard Gilgen and has two sons, Te Rangihuia (9) Havelund (5) and a daughter, Jessica-Lee Ngātaiotehauauru, born in November 2009.

 

 

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

Posted by Stephens Mamari at 11:00 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

Open Sesame

Uncategorized 1 Response »
May 232012

Gnat's Landing Bar and GrillFor some time, Open Access has been a sort of gnat in my office, bugging me periodically, but always just on the edge of getting my full attention. Perhaps due in large part to the fact that our journals simply cost much less than those in other disciplines, law librarians have been able to stay mostly on the outside of this discussion. The marketing benefits of building institutional repositories are just as strong for law schools as other disciplines, however, and many law schools are now boarding the train — with librarians conducting. If you’re new to the discussion of Open Access in general, I suggest Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview for an excellent introduction. This piece is meant to briefly summarize the goals, progress, and future of OA as it applies (mostly) to legal scholarship.

Background and History
Open Access is not merely the buzzword of the moment: Open Access, or OA, describes work that is free to read, by anyone. Though usually tied to discussions of Institutional or Scholarly Repositories, the two do not necessarily have to be connected. Publications can be made “open” via download from an author’s institutional or personal home page, a disciplinary archive such as SSRN or BePress, or through nearly any other type of digital collection – so long as is it provided for free. For readers, free should mean free of cost and free of restrictions. These are sometimes described as gratis OA and libre OA, respectively. As Peter Suber notes, “Gratis OA is free as in beer. Libre OA is free as in beer and free as in speech.”

In addition to the immediate benefits of OA for researchers and for libraries (who would save a great deal of money spent on collections), strong ethical arguments can be made for OA as a necessary public service, given the enormous public support of research (tax dollars). The argument sharpens when research is explicitly supported by Federal or other grant funds. Paying to access grant-funded work amounts to a second charge to the taxpayer, while private publishers profit.

Of course, OA wasn’t an option with print resources; while anyone is “free” to go to a library that subscribes to a journal and read it, physical location itself is a barrier to access. In the networked digital environment, physical location need not be a barrier anymore. For members of the scholarly community who wish to share and discuss work with each other, that might be the end of the story. But while the technology is mature, policies and politics are still developing, and fraught with challenges posed largely by rights holders with significant financial interests in the current publishing system. One vocal segment of that market raises economic objections based on their financial support of the peer review process and other overhead costs related to production and dissemination of scholarly research. Since publishers control the permissions necessary to make OA work most fully, their opposition frustrates the efforts of many OA advocates. Not all publishers are invested in erecting barriers to OA, though; see, e.g., the ROMEO directory of publisher copyright policies and self-archiving. Though some impose embargo periods before posting, many publishers across disciplines allow deposit of the final published version of work.

In the midst of this conflict, many OA proponents acknowledge that production of scholarship is not without costs; Old Faithful didn’t start spouting Arrogant Bastard Ale one bright morning. Separate from the mechanism for sharing the Open Access version of an article, there are charges associated with its production that must be supported. The OA movement seeks a new model for recuperating these costs, rather than eliminating the costs altogether.

Interoperability
So, the “open” part of Open Access is roughly equivalent to “free” (for the reader), which presents economic challenges that remain to be solved. What about the “access” part?

Access to physical literature was largely a matter of indexing and physical copies; inclusion in the leading index(es) of a field was an honor (and potential economic advantage) to journals. Collection development decisions used to be made based in part on whether a journal was indexed. Access to online literature requires more than simply the digital equivalent in order to sufficiently serve the community, though: both the ability to download the article, and the ability to search across the literature are required for researchers to effectively manage the volume of literature.

As a foundational matter, openness in scholarly communication requires a certain amount of interoperability between the archives that serve up scholarship. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develop standards to promote interoperability between archives. Such standards support harvesting and assembling the metadata from multiple OAI-compliant archives to facilitate searching and browsing across collections in an institution, field, or discipline.

Paths to OA
One repeated practical question around Open Access is logistical: Who will build the archive, and how will it be populated on a regular basis? There are several models for implementing Open Access. Disciplinary Archives, Institutional or Unit/Departmental Repositories, and Self Archiving are all paths that can be taken, somewhat separate from publishers’ progress towards OA.

Disciplinary repositories are somewhat common around the academic community: PLoS & PubMedCentral, for example, provide access to a large collection of works in Science and Medicine. Like SSRN/LSN, they provide a persistent, accessible host for scholarship, and searchable collection for new papers in the field. One difference in the legal community is in the primary publishing outlets: for most law faculty, the most prestigious placement is in a top-20 law school-published law journal. These journals vary on their OA friendliness, but many faculty read their agreements in such a way to allow this sort of archiving. SSRN has thus provided a low bar for legal scholars to make their work available openly. SSRN also provides a relatively simple, if not entirely useful, metric for scholarly impact in appointments and in promotion and tenure discussions. As of last checking, SSRN’s abstract database was at 395k+, and their full text collection at 324k.

Institutional or Unit/Departmental Repositories (IRs) are also becoming a popular choice for institutions seeking to promote their brand, and to increase the profile of their faculty. A variety of options are available for creating an IR, from open-source hosting to turnkey or hosted systems like BePress’ Digital Commons. Both avenues tend to offer flexibility in creating communities within the IR for subjects or other series, for handling embargoes and other specialized needs. BePress’ Digital Commons, for example, can serve as an IR and/or a publishing system for the peer-review and editing process. As a path to Open Access, the only barriers to IRs are institutional support for the annual licensing/hosting fee and some commitment of staff for populating the IR with publications (or facilitating, if authors will self-archive).

Self-archiving represents an appeal directly to authors, who are not the tough sell that publishers tend to be. As Suber notes, the scholarly publishing arena lacks the economic disincentives to OA normally present for authors. Scholarly law journal articles, the bread and butter of the legal academy, do not produce royalties, so authors have nothing to lose from making their work available in OA platforms. One route to OA, therefore, is self-archiving by researchers. But while they might support OA in principle, researchers’ own best interests may push them to publish in “barrier-based” journals to protect their tenure and grant prospects, despite the interests of both the public and their own scientific community in no-cost, barrier-free access.

What about mandates as part of the path to OA? Recently, some academic institutions and grant agencies have begun instituting some form of mandate of open access publication. The NIH mandate, for example, implemented in 2008, requires deposit in PubMed Central within twelve months of publication for the results of any of their funded research. Others have followed, including Harvard Law School. As a path to OA, both are useful, though funder mandates alone wouldn’t hit enough of the literature to make a difference in terms of access for researchers. Institutional mandates, however, just might:

“When complemented by funding agency and foundation public-access mandates that capture the work originating with industry and government researchers who may not have faculty status, university mandates will, in time, produce nearly universal access to all the scientific literature.”

– David Shulenberger

ROARMAP tracks these mandates and the directed repositories for each. Though other universities and departments have instituted mandates, the 2008 Harvard Law mandate is notable for having originated with the faculty:

“The Harvard Law School is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy to a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.”

Federal Input
Two recent bills dealt with open access: FRPAA, which would mandate OA for federally-funded research; and the Research Works Act (RWA), which would have prohibited such mandates. RWA (HR 3699) was withdrawn in late February of 2012, following Elsevier’s withdrawal of support. Its sponsors issued this statement:

“As the costs of publishing continue to be driven down by new technology, we will continue to see a growth in open-access publishers. This new and innovative model appears to be the wave of the future. … The American people deserve to have access to research for which they have paid. This conversation needs to continue, and we have come to the conclusion that the Research Works Act has exhausted the useful role it can play in the debate.”

FRPAA (HR 4004 and S 2096), on the other hand, is intended “to provide for Federal agencies to develop public access policies relating to research conducted by employees of that agency or from funds administered by that agency.” FRPAA would require any agencies with expenditures over $100 million annually to make manuscripts of the articles published from their funding public within six months of publication – FRPAA puts the burden/freedom on each agency to maintain an archive or draw on an existing archive (e.g., PMC). Each agency is free to develop their own policy as fits their needs (and perhaps their researchers’ needs). The bill also gives the agency a nonexclusive license to disseminate the work, with no other impact on copyright or patent rights. The bill also requires that the agency have a long-term preservation plan for such publications.

Copyright Tangles
How does copyright limit the effectiveness of mandates and other archiving? Less than the average law librarian might imagine. Except where an author’s publishing agreement specifies otherwise, the scholarly community generally agrees that an author holds copyright in his or her submitted manuscript. That copy, referred to as the pre-refereeing preprint, may generally be deposited in an Institutional repository such as the University of Illinois’ IDEALS, posted to an author’s/institution’s SSRN or BePress account, or to their own personal web page.

Ongoing Work
ARL/SPARC encourages universities to voice their approval and support of FRPAA. Researchers around the academy are beginning to show support as well: research has indicated that researchers would self-archive if they were 1) informed about the option, and 2) permitted by their copyright/licensing agreements with publishers to do so. With greater education about the benefits of Open Access for the institution as well as the scholarly community, authors could be encouraged to make better use of institutional and other archives.

In the legal academy, scholarly publishing is somewhat unusual. The preprint distribution culture is strong, and the main publishing outlets are run by the law schools – not by large, publicly-traded U.S. and foreign media corporations. Reprint permission requests are often handled by a member of the law school’s staff – or by a law student – and it’s unclear how much the journals know or care about republication or OA issues in general. But authors and their home institutions aren’t necessarily waiting around for answers; they’re archiving now, and taking down works later if asked. Carol Watson and James Donovan have written extensively about their experience with building and implementing an institutional repository at the University of Georgia, using the Berkeley Electronic Press Digital Commons software. See, e.g., Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age, Carol A. Watson, James M. Donovan, and Pamela Bluh; White Paper: Behind a Law School’s Decision to Implement an Institutional Repository, James M. Donovan and Carol A. Watson; and Implementing BePress’ Digital Commons Institutional Repository Solution: Two Views from the Trenches, James M. Donovan and Carol A. Watson.

Conclusion The bottom-line is, whether you’re an author or a librarian (or some other type of information/knowledge professional), you should be thinking about current and future access to the results of research — and the logistical/economical/political challenges — whether that research is happening in law or elsewhere in the academy.

Stephanie DavidsonStephanie Davidson is Head of Public Services at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Her research addresses public services in the academic law library, and understanding scholarly research methods and behavior.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

Posted by Davidson Stephanie at 10:26 am Tagged with: , , ,

Keeping and Deleting Patron Records in Law Libraries

Data Deletion, Data Privacy, Law librarians, privacy 3 Responses »
Apr 152012

As researchers use materials in libraries, their actions tend to generate records—research trails in digital databases, lists of borrowed books, and correspondence with librarians. Most of the time, these records are innocuous, but to facilitate freedom of inquiry, librarians generally hold these records as confidential. This confidentiality is especially important in law libraries because legal matters can be very sensitive and stressful. Researchers implicitly trust librarians with at least hints of concerns the researchers would prefer not be generally known. If researchers knew any records of their questions could become known to others, some researchers would avoid using library collections or asking librarians for advice, guidance that very well may help them find valuable information.

In her interesting post, Meg Leta points out that, despite some exhortations that information on Web lasts forever, most information now online will disappear at some point. Websites go down when their owners fail to pay hosting fees. Data is deleted, either by purpose or mistake. A file sitting on a drive or disc will, without maintenance, eventually becomes inaccessible because the storage media has decayed or because the hardware and software needed to read the file has become obsolete. Since information will tend to vanish without action on our part, Leta suggests we should instead focus on actively saving information that is worth keeping.

Leta makes an excellent point, but I’d suggest that in addition to thinking carefully about what information needs to be kept, legal professionals also should consider whether certain types of information warrant purposeful destruction. I’d also suggest that for law libraries, patrons should be given the ability to retain, either through the library or themselves, records of their use of library resources.

Leaving Breadcrumbs Along the Research Trail

Just as most web browsers keep a history of websites visited and search engines retain logs of search terms, law libraries and their vendors maintain records of some researcher interactions with library resources and staff. A very thorough researcher could generate records by using web browsers on library computers, writing to library staff, borrowing books, and accessing databases that require individual user accounts. Many of the major legal databases, such as Westlaw, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg Law require users to log in and maintain individual research trails.

Just as Leta said, most of these records will be destroyed over time through the library’s and vendors’ normal procedures. The library computers probably are set to erase their browser histories every so often, and most integrated library systems delete circulation records once books are returned. Legal databases keep research trails, but generally those trails eventually expire. However, the vendors also keep server logs and track users with cookies; those records probably are deleted at some point, but probably later than when users lose access to their research trails. Any written records the librarians keep of patron interactions might be covered by an organizational records retention schedule; if not, they are kept at the whim of the librarian.

So this appears to be the present situation: law libraries and their vendors collect a variety of records about their patrons’ research. Through normal business processes, much of those records is eventually discarded. Depending on the researcher’s circumstances, the records may be sensitive, and librarians generally strive to keep all such records confidential as a matter of professional ethics. Is there anything in the status quo worth changing?

Retaining Information has Risks and Benefits

Almost all the records libraries keep about their patrons have a purpose. Circulation records are kept so libraries do not lose materials and to make usage statistics. Vendors keep research trails so researchers can retrace their steps and know how their products are being used. After a certain period of time, these records are generally not needed for those reasons.

While records are needed for important reasons, keeping them also involves risk of harming researchers. The most serious risks are that a researcher’s sensitive legal research records will be revealed to others who should not have that information and that the records will be used for a purpose different from the one for which the information was originally collected. I imagine law libraries are not high-priority targets for criminals and government agents, but then again, library databases and email systems are probably not equipped with state-of-the-art security. Certainly the longer records are retained, the more opportunity there is for security to be compromised.

It is easier to imagine a scenario in which library records are used for a new purpose. Database vendors could decide to use research histories  to market products to researchers. This seems possible for law students and attorneys. Publishers could seek to use library or database records to help track researchers committing copyright infringement. I have not heard of any recent attempts by law enforcement to obtain law library records and it is hard to fathom what relevance the records would have to any investigation. On the other hand, the government has sought library records before.

These risks that library records might be wrongly disclosed or misused exist while the records are useful, but the beneficial intended uses of the records outweigh the risks. Once that need has ended, though, there is no justification for keeping the records. The minimize risks to patrons, libraries should determine how long they need certain types of records and then destroy the data as soon as it is not required.

On the other hand, records of research activity can be used to benefit patrons. Surely many researchers could use a list of every book they have borrowed, or a research trail that covers multiple databases. Perhaps software could be developed that would analyze research histories to help make data-driven collection development decisions or recommend new books and articles to faculty and students. Services like this might require keeping patron records for quite some time.

Librarians thinking of future historians might suggest that patron records should be kept in some form so on ancestors can have a better understanding of how we conducted research and to look into the thought processes of significant legal scholars.

Giving Patrons Greater Control of Their Records

How these risks and benefits weigh against each other depends to a great deal on the researcher’s circumstances. For many faculty and students, the privacy of their library records is not a matter of great concern. For attorneys and private citizens (and faculty and students when conducting research on their personal legal matters), privacy is very important, and if they knew of a risk that their records might be used in unexpected ways, they may reduce their use of library resources, or be deterred from using the library altogether.

I suggest law librarians seek to give researchers greater control over their library records. Records should be retained for the absolute least amount of time needed for providing the services for which the data was collected. After that time, the records should be rendered totally irretrievable or reduced to anonymous statistics that cannot be traced to any individual. However, before the records are destroyed, they should be easily accessed and saved by the researcher for her own use. Researchers that choose this option can then keep their records as they see fit, just as they can download bank statements and export their financial transactions to personal money management software.

Below are suggestions for how this might be done.

Make a privacy policy and records retention schedule – Each library should publish a privacy policy that describes how the library collects and retains records of patron interactions. Each library should also make a records retention schedule that details how long each type of record is kept and how researchers can obtain a copy of their records before they are destroyed. Many researchers may choose not to download their records, but in that case the data will be destroyed as soon as it is not needed. The default option is most protective of patron privacy.

Make records easy to obtain and use – Researchers who wish to save their records should be able to more easily obtain them in a format that is compatible with software that organizes, searches, and retrieves the records. For instance, borrowing histories and database research trails could provide citations of accessed materials that are compatible with citation management software like Zotero, citeulike, and Mendeley. Since most integrated library systems and journal databases are provided by vendors, the best librarians can do is urge vendors to add these functions and subscribe to products that allow privacy-protecting defaults while also giving patrons access to their records.

Convince vendors to do the same – Libraries license most of the systems used to catalog and provide access to their collections. Protecting researcher privacy and providing patron access to their records will require the cooperation of vendors. Librarians should ask vendors to publish privacy policies that tell researchers what records are collected and how long they are retained, and encourage development of software that will give patrons copies of their records that are compatible with leading research management software.

For further reading on records destruction and privacy, I suggest Daniel Solove’s Understanding Privacy (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Benjamin Keele is a reference librarian at the Wolf Law Library of the William & Mary Law School. He earned a J.D. and M.L.S. from Indiana University. His research interests include copyright, privacy, and scholarly publishing. His website is benkeele.com.

 

 

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

[Editor's Note] For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see: Meg Leta Ambrose, Accounting for Informatics in the “Right to be Forgotten” Debate.

Posted by Keele Benjamin at 3:19 pm Tagged with: , ,

Envitool: Helps companies comply with EHS and CSR

Electronic legal publishing, Legal publishing, legal translation, Multilingual legal information retrieval No Responses »
Mar 302012

The Swedish legal publisher Notisum AB has been on the Swedish market for online legal publishing since 1996.  Our Internet-based law book at www.notisum.se is read by more than 50,000 persons per week and our customers range from municipalities and government institutions to Swedish multinationals.

Now we are heading for China, and I would like to share with you some practical experiences from this highly dynamic market and our challenges in trying to conquer it.

The case for a legal monitoring tool, codenamed “EnviTool”

In close co-operation with our customers, we had developed a set of specialized Internet based tools  in Sweden for supporting the process of legal compliance and legal information sharing within big organizations. The key driver of these needs was the growing number of certificates according to the international environmental management standard ISO 14001:2004.

ISO 14001 is a worldwide industry standard to help companies to improve their environmental performance through the implementation of an environmental management system. There is much to say about management systems. Continuous improvement is the heart of the matter–it is all about doing the right things right. Establish a plan, do what you planned, check your results and then start all over by correcting your plans. Plan, Do, Check, Act.

According to the standard, you have to identify the relevant environmental legislation for your organization. You need access to those laws and regulations, and you have to keep an updated list. You should also make the information available to the people of your organization.

By providing an online legal register, monitored for changes, with a whole set of information sharing and workflow features, Notisum helps the certified companies to comply with the environmental legislation.

We developed this system step by step.  When it came to going outside the borders of the Kingdom of Sweden, we changed the name from Rättsnätet+Miljö to EnviTool.

The case for China

Sweden is a country of very high penetration of the ISO 14001 standard, and the use of the standard is in a mature phase in most organizations. China, on the other hand, is number one in the world, with more than 70,000 certificates issued. The growth is double-digit. So China is the place to be if you have products for this specific customer group. The users of the standard are yet immature in China, so we knew there were some challenges out there.

The market for legal information tools is overall immature in China and legal compliance is not always on top of the manager’s priority lists. However, Notisum took the first steps, starting in 2009, to take on the challenge to make China our second home market. Many challenges, expected and unexpected, were waiting for EnviTool.

Step one – the product

Like many commercial ventures, the EnviTool project was the result of a randomly started chain of events. Our Swedish CEO was playing golf with a professor at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.  The professor was in charge of a student exchange program between National University of Singapore (NUS) and KTH. We were asked to host an internship for an ambitious computer science student in our company for one academic year.

The internship was successful, our student was doing a great job and we learned a lot about Asia and the Chinese culture. We have now hosted three excellent NUS students from Singapore, all good representatives of their university and their country.  And all of them bilingual English and Chinese. That’s when we decided that China would be an interesting market to try. And yes – China is far away from Sweden, it is terribly big and it was really too large a challenge for our company. We wanted to try anyway, with the hope that Singapore could be the bridge for us.

We decided to start a subsidiary in Singapore and so we did. It is easy, by the way. According to the World Bank, Singapore ranks number one in the world in ease of doing business. Coming from Sweden, ranked number 50 in the world in terms of how easily you pay your taxes, I had an almost religious moment when we got a letter of gratitude from the Singaporean tax authorities after paying our taxes. Not so in Sweden, I may add…

With the first NUS intern now as our first employee, we started translating and adapting our internet tool together with our development manager in Sweden. The technological challenges were there, of course. We base our technology on the Microsoft.NET platform, but the support for the simplified Chinese character set was not totally implemented everywhere.  Multi-language support was developed, and plenty were the occasions in the beginning when Swedish words popped up unexpectedly. The search function in Chinese is different in EnviTool and the relations between the legislative documents were so different from the Swedish and European law that we had to re-design our database structure.

Step two – the market research

With good help from the Swedish Trade Council in China, we did market research to see if there could be a similar market in China and if our business model could work.

After three journeys and two projects together with the trade council, we decided to give it a try. The EnviTool China project was about to take off. Learning to eat properly with chopsticks was part of the experience. Learning to appreciate the Chinese food was easier although there are some zoological challenges there too, outside the scope of this blog entry.

At this point in time we also employed a Chinese/Swedish project manager with extensive knowledge and experience in the field.

Step three – the content

Translating the tool to Chinese and English was the easy part. When it came to the content, we had to throw out everything from Sweden and put in Chinese legislation and comments. We soon found interesting challenges.

Our first experience of the Chinese legal tradition,which is in many ways different from where we come from, was the search for a standard for citations. In the Swedish databases we had successfully used computer software to automatically find citations, law titles, cross references and other document data.  It became clear to us that there were no shortcuts in the Chinese material. We had to input all data manually.

We decided to restrict the information to cover relevant legislation in the EHS (Environmental, Health & Safety) and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) field and to concentrate on the national level with some provincial/municipal areas like Beijing and Shanghai. The EHS/CSR users are professionals in their field of work and their industries. They are not lawyers and not very used to legal information systems. EnviTool were developed with EHS/CSR managers in our minds. We wrote the editorial content to suit the needs of our target audience.

We realized that we needed a partner in China to provide fast and timely information. In ChinaLawInfo, established by Peking University in association with the university’s Legal Information Center, we found a great partner. They are the most important legal information provider in China and we saw that Notisum of Sweden and ChinaLawInfo had many similarities in experience and way of working. Yes, we are small and they are big, but that goes for Sweden and China all over. So  EnviTool now provides the EHS/CSR laws and regulations from both ChinaLawInfo and government sources. We also have an on-going editorial co-operation in Beijing.

By now we also had good content. The EnviTool Internet service and database, provided from our Singapore company servers, were released in its first version in the fall of 2010.

Step four – market introduction

If company start-up was a short track in Singapore, it was a longer journey in the world’s second biggest economy. After having tried 50 other names, Envitool finally was translated to 安纬同 in Chinese and we got the business permit in August 2011.

We employed the people we needed and found a partner to help us with HR and finance issues.  Since then we have started our sales and marketing activities, moving slowly forward. The use of legal information tools served from Singapore is combined with management consulting from our team in Shanghai. We provide training in using the tool and can assist the clients in finding the laws and regulations relevant to their operation.

The second generation of the site is up and running at www.envitool.com and we are proud to have customers from China, the US, Japan and four different European countries.

What we have learned and what we think of the future

To get to know China and the Chinese people is of course one part of the fun. Being a European, you make many mistakes, sometimes because of language, sometimes cultural.

One example of this confusion was when I intervened in the editorial process. In EnviTool we provide bi-lingual Chinese/English short and long comments to laws and regulations. In the Swedish service, which I am more familiar with, the short comment is rendered in italics with the longer comment below in plain text. In the English version of the comments in EnviTool, the short one was not in italics. I complained and our programmer quickly changed this. Shortly thereafter, at a customer meeting, I showed the comments, now in Chinese language version. (I don’t understand a word of Chinese.)  Can you imagine Chinese characters in italics? I can tell you, it makes no sense and it looks bad. That was the language mistake. The cultural mistake was managerial. A Swedish employee would have told me how stupid I were, if I came up with such a bad idea. The Asian employee (highly intelligent and highly educated) probably saw the problem and maybe thought “the boss is more stupid than usual, but he is my boss so I have better do what he tells me!”. A lot to learn, many aspects to consider.

To conclude, the start-up was a bit slow because of the red tape but so far, our government contacts have been smooth. We have felt very welcome at the Chinese authorities like the Ministry of Environmental Protection and local governments. In the end, our goals are similar: better environmental and occupational health & safety legal compliance – better environment and better life for the citizens.

We know it will take a long time for us to get the knowledge and experience needed to be a significant player in the Chinese market, and we are prepared to stay there and step by step build our presence.  It took many years to build a loyal and substantial customer base in Sweden. It will take even longer in China.

 

Magnus Svernlöv is the founder and chairman of the Swedish online legal publisher Notisum (www.notisum.se) and its Chinese subsidiary Envitool (www.envitool.cn). He holds an MBA from INSEAD, France, a MScEE degree from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden and a BA from the School of Business, Ecnomics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He welcomes any comment or feedback to ms@notisum.se

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

 

Posted by Pratt Judith at 10:01 am Tagged with: ,

The Need to Demystify Legal Relevance

information retrieval, Legal citations, Legal knowledge representation 1 Response »
Mar 172012

“To be blunt, there is just too much stuff.” (Robert C. Berring, 1994 [1])

Law is an information profession where legal professionals take on the role of intermediaries towards their clients. Today, those legal professionals routinely use online legal research services like Westlaw and LexisNexis to gain electronic access to legislative, judicial and scholarly legal documents.

Put simply, legal service providers make legal documents available online and enable users to search these text collections in order to find documents relevant to their information needs. For quite some time the main focus of providers has been the addition of more and more documents to their online collections. Quite contrary to other areas, like Web search, where an increase in the number of available documents has been accompanied by major changes in the search technology employed, the search systems used in online legal research services have changed little since the early days of computer-assisted legal research (CALR).

It is my belief, however, that the search technology employed in CALR systems will have to dramatically change in the next years. The future of online legal research services will more and more depend on the systems’ ability to create useful result lists to users’ queries. The continuing need to make additional texts available will only speed up the change. Electronic availability of a sufficient number of potentially relevant texts is no longer the main issue; quick findability of a few highly relevant documents among hundreds or even thousands of other potentially relevant ones is.

To reach that goal, from a search system’s perspective, relevance ranking is key. In a constantly growing number of situations – just like Professor Berring already stated almost 20 years ago (see above ) – even carefully chosen keywords bring back “too much stuff”.  Successful ranking, that is the ordering of search results according to their estimated relevance, becomes the main issue. A system’s ability to correctly assess the relevance of texts for every single individual user, and for every single of their queries will quickly become – or has arguably already become in most cases – the next holy grail of computer-assisted legal research.

Until a few years back providers could still successfully argue that search systems should not be blamed for the lack of  “theoretically, maybe, sometimes feasible” relevance-ranking capabilities, but rather that users had to be blamed for their missing search skills. I do not often hear that line of argumentation any longer, which certainly does not have to do with any improvement of (Boolean) search skills of end users. Representatives of service providers do not dare to follow that line of argumentation any longer, I think, because every single day every one of them uses Google by punching in vague, short queries and still mostly gets back sufficiently relevant top results. Why should this not work in CALR systems?

Indeed. Why, one might ask, is there not more Web search technology in contemporary computer-assisted legal research? Sure, according to another often-stressed argument of system providers, computer-assisted legal research is certainly different from Web search. In Web search we typically do not care about low recall as long as this guarantees high precision, while in CALR trading off recall for precision is problematic. But even with those clear differences, I have, for example, not heard a single plausible argument why the cornerstone of modern Web search, link analysis, should not be successfully used in every single CALR system out there.

These statements certainly are blunt and provocative generalizations. Erich Schweighofer, for example, has already even shown in 1999 (pre-mainstream-Web),  that there had in fact been technological changes in legal information retrieval in his well-named piece “The Revolution in Legal Information Retrieval or: The Empire Strikes Back”. And there have also been free CALR systems like PreCYdent that have fully employed citation-analysis techniques in computer-assisted legal research and have thereby – even if they did not manage to stay profitable – shown “one of the most innovative SE [search engine] algorithms“, according to experts.

An exhaustive and objective discussion of the various factors that contribute to the slow technological change in computer-assisted legal research can certainly neither be offered by myself alone nor in this short post. For a whole mix of reasons, there is not (yet) more “Google” in CALR, including the fear of system providers to be held liable for query modifications which might (theoretically) lead to wrong expert advice, and the lack of pressure from potential and existing customers to use more modern search technology.

What I want to highlight, however, is one more general explanation which is seldom put forward explicitly. What slows down technological innovation in online legal research, in my opinion, is also the interest of the whole legal profession to hold on to a conception of “legal relevance” that is immune to any kind of computer algorithm. A successfully employed, Web search-like ranking algorithm in CALR would after all not only produce comfortable, highly relevant search results, but would also reveal certain truths about legal research: The search for documents of high “legal relevance” to a specific factual or legal situation is, in most cases, a process which follows clear rules. Many legal research routines follow clear and pre-defined patterns which could be translated into algorithms. The legal profession will have to accept that truth at some point, and will therefore have to define and communicate “legal relevance” much less mystically and more pragmatically.

Again, also at this point, one might ask “Why?” I am certain that if the legal profession, that is legal professionals and their CALR service providers, do not include up-to-date search technology in their CALR systems, someone else will at some point do so without the need for a lot of involvement of legal professionals. To be blunt, at this point, Google can still serve as an example for our systems, at some point soon it might simply set an example instead of our systems.

Anton GeistAnton Geist is Law Librarian at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business) University Library. He law degrees from University of Vienna (2006) and University of  Edinburgh (2010). He is grateful for feedback and discussions and can be contacted at home@antongeist.com.

[1] Berring, Robert C. (1994), Collapse of the Structure of the Legal Research Universe: The Imperative of Digital Information, 69 Wash. L. Rev. 9.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

[Editor's Note] For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see: Núria Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of legal information … Are we up for the challenge?; Marcie Baranich, HeinOnline Takes a New Approach to Legal Research With Subject Specific Research Platforms; Elisabetta Fersini, The JUMAS Experience: Extracting Knowledge From Judicial Multimedia Digital Libraries; João Lima, et.al, LexML Brazil Project; Joe Carmel, LegisLink.Org: Simplified Human-Readable URLs for Legislative Citations; Robert Richards, Context and Legal Informatics Research; John Sheridan, Legislation.gov.uk

Posted by Geist Anton at 12:42 pm Tagged with: ,

Accounting for Informatics in the "Right to be Forgotten" Debate

Data Privacy, privacy 1 Response »
Feb 232012

Editor’s note: This is the first in a 2-part series on issues of content permanence. Benjamin Keele of the William and Mary Law Library will be writing on data deletion principles for VoxPopuLII in April.

A Future Full of the Past?
The current consensus seems to be that information, once online, is permanent. The Disney Channel runs a PSA warning kids to be careful what they put online because “You’re leaving a permanent (and searchable) record any time you post something.” Concerns about content permanence have led many European countries to establish a legal “Right to be Forgotten” to protect citizens from the shackles of the past presented by the Internet. The prospect of content adjustment in the name of privacy has exposed cultural variations on perspectives of the global village[1]. In Europe, the “Right to be Forgotten” has gained traction as a legal mechanism for handling such information issues and has been named a top priority by the European Union Data Privacy Commission. This right essentially transforms public information into private information after a period of time, by limiting the access to third parties, “[T]he right to silence on past events in life that are no longer occurring.”[2] What in Italy and France is called oblivion, however, is controversial and has been called “rewriting history”, “personal history revisionism”, and “censorship” in the U.S.

Benjamin Keele of the William and Mary Law Library has previously addressed the “data” aspect of the “Right to be Forgotten” debate, outlining data deletion principles for organizations privately holding user information — the footprints we leave behind as we interact with sites and devices. This post, and my research generally, focuses on the “information” element in the debate: the content a user posts to the Web. The question often posed in this debate is whether an individual should have the right to manipulate or access content about his or her past that is generated through search engine results. But, this is actually the wrong question. Information Science research tells us that permanence is not a reality and it may never be. Information falls off the Web for many reasons. The right question to ask is, “what information should we actively save, and what information should we allow to fade, particularly when it harms an individual?” Fortunately, Information Science research offers wisdom for answering as well as framing this question.

The Information Preservation Paradox

In this age, “[l]ife, it seems, begins not at birth but with online conception. And a child’s name is the link to that permanent record.” You are what Google says you are, and expectant parents search prospective baby names to help their kids yield top search results in the future. Only a few rare parents want their children to be lost in a virtual crowd, but is infamy preferable? In 2003, A Canadian high school student unwittingly became the Star Wars Kid, and according to Google, he still is as of 2011. A New England Patriots cheerleader was fired for blog content, a Millersville University student teacher was not allowed to graduate because of images on Facebook, and UCLA sophomore Alexandra Wallace quit school and made a public apology for a racist video she posted on YouTube that spurred debate online about a university’s authority to monitor or regulate student speech. Though discoverable through public Google searches, the posted content offered little in the way of context or truth about the owner’s character. In 1992, John Venables and Robert Thompson viciously murdered a 2 year-old and became infamous online and off as the youngest people ever to be incarcerated for murder in English history.

These stories deserve varying levels of sympathy but are all embarrassing, negative, and lead the subjects to want to disconnect their names from their past transgressions to make such information more difficult to discover when interviewing for a job, college, or first date. Paradoxically, the only individuals who have been offered oblivion are the two who committed the most heinous social offense: Venables and Thompson were given new identities upon their release from juvenile incarceration. It may actually be easier for two convicted murderers to get a job than it is for Alexandra Wallace.

This paradox is one of many that result from an incomprehensive and distorted conception of information persistence. The real problem with new forms of access to old information is that without rhyme or reason, much of it disappears while pieces of harmful content may remain. Time disrupts the information system and information values upon which U.S. information privacy law has been based, so we must reassess our views and practices in light of this disruption. Objections to the preservation of personal information may be valid; when content has aged, it becomes increasingly uncontextualized, poorly duplicated, irrelevant, and/or inaccurate. Basic but difficult questions about the role of the Internet in society today and for the future must be answered, and these will be the foundation for resolving disputes that arise from personal information lingering online.

The Crisis of Disappearing Content

Privacy scholars and journalists have embraced the notion of permanence – that we cannot be separated from an identifying piece of online information short of a name change. But information persistence research suggests otherwise – perhaps showing even a decreasing lifespan for content. When articulating the reasons behind the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle explained that the average lifespan of a webpage was around 100 days. In 2000, Cho and Garcia found that 77% of content was still alive after a day[3]; Brewington estimated that 50% of content was gone after 100 days[4]. In 2003, Fetterly found 65% of content alive after a week[5], and in 2004, Ntoulas found only 10% of content alive after a year[6]. Recent work suggests, albeit tentatively, that data is becoming less persistent over time; for example, Daniel Gomes and Mario Silva studied the persistence of content between 2006 and 2007 and discovered a rate of only 55% alive after 1 day, 41% after a week, 23% after 100 days, and 15% after a year[7]. While all of these studies contained various goals, designs, and methods preventing true synthesis, they all contribute to the well-established principle that the Web is ephemeral[8]. At best, the average lifespan of content is a matter of months or, in rare cases, years — certainly not forever.

The Internet has not defeated time, and information like everything, gets old, decays, and dies, even online. Quite the opposite of permanent, the Web cannot be self-preserving[9]. Permanence is not yet upon us – now is the time to develop practices of information stewardship that will preserve our cultural history as well as protect the privacy rights of those that will live with the information.

Information Stewardship

Old information may be valuable to decision-making or history. The first has been considered by laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act and database designers with an understanding of the fact that more information does not necessarily or usually result in better quality decisions and that old information may have transformed into misinformation. The second is more difficult: how do we decide what information may be important when we reflect on the past as researchers and historians? Archival ethics, a developed field in library and information science, offers rich insight. The Society of American Archivists have drafted a Code of Ethics that states, “[Archivists] establish procedures and policies to protect the interests of the donors, individuals, groups, and institutions whose public and private lives and activities are recorded in their holdings. As appropriate, archivists place access restrictions on collections to ensure that privacy and confidentiality are maintained, particularly for individuals and groups who have no voice or role in collections’ creation, retention, or public use.”[10]

The Web, of course, does not have a hierarchy to hand down such decisions. It is a bottom-up structure. Therefore, users must find their own inner archivists. They must protect what is important, assess what may be harmful, and take responsibility for the content they contribute to the Web. For a fascinating example of such Web ethics, go to the Star Wars Kid Wikipedia page, and click the “talk” link. You will find that Wikipedia’s biographies of living persons policy has been implemented. This implementation, however, does not prevent the page from being the first listed in Google’s search results for the Star Wars Kid’s real name. There are many other sites that follow some form of archival ethics; many of them limit access to content by altering how private information may be retrieved by a search, either by not offering full-text search functionality on the site (see the Internet Archive) or by using robots.txt to communicate with crawlers that information is off-limits to them (see Public Resource). These access decisions essentially create a card catalog-like system of access to the private information. Library and information scientists have worked with these issues for a very long time. Their expertise is desperately needed as these difficult policy decisions are made at a user, site, network, national, and international level.

[1] Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962).

[2] Georgio Pino, “The Right to Personal Identity in Italian Private Law: Constitutional Interpretation and Judge-Made Rights,” In The Harmonization of Private Law in Europe, M. Van Hoecke and F. Osts (eds.), 237 (2000).

[3] Junghoo Cho and Hector Garcia-Molina, The Evolution of the Web and Implications for an Incremental Crawler, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases 200-209 (2000).

[4] Brian E. Brewington and George Cybenko, How Dynamic is the Web? Estimating the Information Highway Speed Limit 33 (1-6) Comput. Netw. 257-276 (2000).

[5] Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse, Mark Najork, and Janet Wiener, A Large-Scale Study of the Evolution of Web Pages 34(2) Software Practice and Experience 213-237 (2004).

[6] Alexandros Ntoulas, Junghoo Cho, and Christopher Olston, What’s New on the Web? The Evolution of the Web from a Search Engine Perspective, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on World Wide Web 1-12 (2004).

[7] Gomes and Silva, supra note 4.

[8] Wallace Koehler, A Longitudinal Study of Web Pages Continued: A Consideration of Document Persistence 9(2) Information Research 1 (2004).

[9] Julian Masanes, Web Archiving, at 7 (2006).

[10] Society of American Archivists, “Code of Ethics for Archivists,” at http://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics (2011).

Editor’s Note: For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see: Robert Richards, Context and Legal Informatics Research.

Meg Leta Ambrose is a doctoral student at the University of Colorado’s interdisciplinary Technology, Media, & Society program. She is a fellow with the computer science department, a research assistant with the law school’s Silicon Flatirons Center, and Provost’s University Library Fellow. She has been awarded the CableLabs fellowship for remainder of her doctoral work. Meg received a J.D. from the University of Illinois in 2008 and can be found at megleta.com.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt.

Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

Posted by Leta Ambrose Meg at 6:27 pm Tagged with: , ,

Jurispedia: Perspectives

Crowdsourcing the writing of secondary legal resources, Public access to legal information, User-generated content and legal information, Wikis and law No Responses »
Feb 152012

JurisPedia, the shared law, is an academic project accessible on the Web and devoted to systems of law as well as legal and political sciences throughout the world. The project aims to offer information about all of the laws of every country in the world. Based on a Wiki, JurisPedia combines the facility of contributions on that platform with an academic control of those insertions a posteriori. This international project is the result of a free collaboration of different research teams and law schools[1].  The different websites are accessible in eight languages (Arabic[2], Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese). In its seven years of existence, the project has grown to more than 15000 entries and outlines of articles dealing with legal systems of thirty countries.

In 2007, Hughes-Jehan approached my colleagues and I, then running the Southern African Legal Information Institute, to host the English language version of JurisPedia. We were excited at the opportunity to work with JurisPedia to introduce the concept of crowdsourcing legal knowledge to Anglophone universities, where we hoped the concept would fall on fertile ground amongst students and academics.

Any follower of the Wikipedia story will know that the reality is not as simple.

Wikipedia operates on 5 pillars:

  1. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia;
  2. Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view;
  3. Wikipedia is free content that anyone can edit, use, modify, and distribute;
  4. Editors should interact with each other in a respectful and civil manner;
  5. Wikipedia does not have firm rules.

In adopting the Wikimedia software, JurisPedia would appear to follow the same principles. There is a significant difference: JurisPedia is not written from a neutral point of view but from a located point of view. Each jurisdiction has a local perspective on their legal concepts. Jurispedia aims to represent the truth in several languages: the law is as it is in a country, not as it could or should be. As a result, we have the bases of a legal encyclopedia representing over 200 legal systems where each concept is clearly identifiable as a part of a national law.

 

Southern African Perspectives

As for Wikipedia, it is the third pillar which seems to strike terror into the hearts of the legal professionals and academics with whom I have spoken.

When describing the idea to one of the trustees of SAFLII, an acting judge on the bench of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, I was alerted to some difficulties that may lie ahead. She is an exceptional, open-minded and forward-thinking legal mind, but she was cautiously horrified at the prospect of crowdsourced legal knowledge. Her concerns, listed below, were to be echoed by the deans of law schools in South Africa who we approached:

  1. Because there is no formal control over submissions – and therefore their accuracy – JurisPedia cannot be used by students as an official reference tool. Citations linking to JurisPedia will not be accepted in student papers.
  2. Crowdsourced legal information, particularly in common law  jurisdictions, runs a high risk of providing an incorrect interpretation of the law.

The overarching concern appears to be that if legal content is made freely available for editing, use, modification and distribution, that the resulting content will be unreliable at best and just plain wrong at worst.

After 7 years online  though, there is a substantial amount of feedback about contributors to the project. The open nature of this law-wiki, to which every internet user can contribute, did not lead to a massive surge of uncontrolled and uncontrollable content. On the contrary, although the number of articles continues to grow, it remains reasonable. The subject of the project (only the law),  and its academic character has certainly led to a auto-selection of contributors of a higher caliber in legal studies. Many of the contributors are students doing a master or a Ph.D. degree, but they also include doctors, professors and professionals in law, such as lawyers, notaries and judges from more than thirty jurisdictions (and one member of parliament from the Kingdom of Morocco). All these specialists give the project a solid foundation and make it a reality by contributing from time to time as they can. More than 19000 users have subscribed to JurisPedia, and in the past year, more than 1000 people, from Arabic language countries for most part, joined its facebook group.

The JurisPedia content is licensed under a Creative Commons licence that is quite customisable so that the content can be reused for purposes other than commercial purposes. This last point is linked to the authorization of the particular contributor. This is a fair choice in the information society where the digital divide is an important element concerning every international project on the internet: for now, only the most developed jurisdictions have the possibility of using such collective creations in a commercial way. And we take pride in counting contributors from Haiti or Sudan (if you want to use commercially the informations they provide, please, contact them…)

In this context concerns regarding the integrity of the content of JurisPedia become less alarming.

However, I believe that these concerns also represent a misconception of what JurisPedia is and what it can be in the Anglophone, common law, legal context.

Occasionally, it is easier to understand what something is by describing what it is not. JurisPedia is not:

  1. A law report
  2. A law journal
  3. A prescribed legal text book
  4. A law professor
  5. A judge
  6. A lawyer

Let us imagine for a moment that JurisPedia is also not an online portal but a student tutorial group, led by a masters student, an associate or full professor. In the course of the tutorial, a few ideas are put forward, discussed, dissected and amended. Each student (in an ideal world!) leaves the group with a better understanding of a particular point of law which has been discussed. Perhaps the person leading the group has also had occasion to review his or her own position. The group dispurses to research the work further for a more formal submission or interaction.

Now let us imagine that a lay person struggling with a specific legal problem related to what the group has been discussing, is allowed a final, précised description of the law relating to this legal problem prepared by this tutorial group. He or she cannot head into a courtroom armed only with this information, but it may allow them to engage with a legal clinic or lawyer feeling a little less lost.

The thought experiment I describe above describes the read-write meme applied to the legal context. In this meme we encourage an involvement in sharing knowledge amongst legal professionals, academics and students in order to create a body of knowledge about the law accessible by the same as well as by the general public.

The risk of inaccuracies is present in all contexts, printed and online, crowdsourced or expert. A topic for a further blog may be the review of perceived versus actual risk but I would like to use this blog post to propose that the actual risk of inaccuracies can be mitigated by one of two approaches I have considered:

  1. a more active engagement by the legal community and academics in the form of editorial committees; or
  2. through the incorporation of JurisPedia into academic curricula.

My immediate concern with the idea of an editorial committee is that we then begin to morph JurisPedia into what it is not. However, if we can teach students of the law to understand how JurisPedia can be used, and how the concept of self-governance can be applied, then we have created a community of lawyers equipped to deal with a world in which there is some wisdom to the crowds.

The English version of JurisPedia is now hosted by AfricanLII, a project started by some of SAFLII’s founding members and now run as s project of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre. As AfricanLII, we want to help build communities around legal content. We believe that encouraging commentary on the law increases the participation of the people for whom the law is intended and therefore helps to shape what the law should be. JurisPedia represents an angle on this: informed submissions by members (or future members) of the legal community. I have described what JurisPedia is not and alluded to what it could be by way of a thought experiment. I propose that we see JurisPedia as an access point. It may be an access point for a student to assist them to understand a point of law that is opaque to them (including references for further reading); or it may be a way for a lay person to understand a point of law which is currently impacting their lives.

JurisPedia represents a mechanism for bringing relevance in today’s social context to the law. How it is used should be considered creatively by those who could potentially benefit from the legal information diaspora of which it is a part.

Global Perspectives
From the global perspective, JurisPedia gives information about Japanese and Canadian constitutional law in Arabic, information about Indonesian, Ukranian and Serbian law in French. It also gives information about experiments like the “legislative theatre”, born in Brazil and experimented with by actors in France and several other countries. JurisPedia is an international project that should follow some simple and unifying guidelines. This is why we tried from the beginning to eliminate any geographical centralization (in order to inform about law as it is and not as it should be in a certain state). The observation of law in the world is not necessarily connected to the idea of a universal legal system, and – since we like to highlight evidence  - law is linked to its culture and can be either more or less[3] similar to our own legal system.

Further, one of the latest enhancements to JurisPedia provides access to the law of 80 countries, by using Google Custom Search on a preselection of relevant websites (see family law in Scotland).

This is why shared law becomes not only a program preventing anybody from ignoring a legal system. On the contrary, JurisPedia will gradually make it possible to appreciate or react to what is done elsewhere, not only in the West but also in the North, East and South[4].

[1] Actually: the Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes en Droit de l’Information et de la Communication (Paul Cézanne University, France); the Faculty  of Law of Can Tho (Vietnam); the Faculty of Law at the University of Groningen (Netherlands); the Institute for the Law and Informatics at the Saarland University (Germany); Juris at the Faculty for political and legal sciences at the University of Quebec in Montreal. This list is not definite, the project being absolutely open, especially to research teams and Faculties of Law of southern states.

[2] This arabic version of JurisPedia (جوريسبيديا ) is most of the time managed by Me Mostafa Attiya, member of the Egyptian Bar Association. He made an amazing job and actively participated to build a large arabian legal community on the project.

[3] An animal is often considered to be a movable property. This can be absurd in some societies where the alliance between human and nature is different. History and literature told us often about this kind of astonishment when cultures observe each other (see, concerning criminal law and 900 years ago, Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, New York: Schocken Books, 1984. (concerning the trials by ordeal during the Frankish period.)

[4] This part was written in Europe…

Hughes-Jehan Vibert is a doctor of Law from the former IRETIJ (Institute of research for the treatment of the legal information, Montpellier University, France) and a research fellow in the Institute of Law and Informatics (IFRI, http://www.rechtsinformatik.de, Germany). He’s ICT project manager for the Network for Legislative Cooperation between the Ministries of Justice of the European Union and also working on a report about the diffusion and access to the law for the International Organization of the Francophonie.

Kerry Anderson is a co-founder of and coordinator for the African Legal Information Institute, a project of the Southern Africa Litigation Center. She has worked variously in web development, research and strategy for an advertising agency, IT startups and financial services corporates.She has a BSc in Computer Science from UCT and an MBA from GIBS. Her MBA dissertation was on the impact of Open Innovation on software research development clusters in South Africa.

[Editor’s Note: For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see: Meritxell Fernández-Barrera, Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content; Isabelle Moncion and Mariya Badeva-Bright, Reaching Sustainability of Free Access to Law Initiatives; and Isabelle Moncion, Building Sustainable LIIs: Or Free Access to Law as Seen Through the Eyes of a Newbie. VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt.

Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

Posted by Anderson Kerry at 5:00 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Protecting Access One Entry at a Time: An Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials

Access to justice, authentication, digital law, free access to law, Law.gov, Legal citations, Public access to legal information 4 Responses »
Feb 012012

In the fall of 2009, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) put out a call for volunteers to participate in our new state working groups to support one of AALL’s top policy priorities: promoting the need for authentication and preservation of digital legal resources. It is AALL policy that the public have no-fee, permanent public access to authentic online legal information. In addition, AALL believes that government information, including the text of all primary legal materials, must be in the public domain and available without restriction.

The response to our call was overwhelming, with volunteers from all 50 states and the District of Columbia expressing interest in participating. To promote our public policy priorities, the initial goals of AALL’s working groups were to:

  • Take action to oppose any plan in their state to eliminate an official print legal resource in favor of online-only, unless the electronic version is digitally authenticated and will be preserved for permanent public access;
  • Oppose plans to charge fees to access legal information electronically; and
  • Ensure that any legal resources in a state’s raw-data portal include a disclaimer so that users know that the information is not an official or authentic resource (similar to what is included on the Code of Federal Regulations XML on Data.gov).

In late 2009, AALL’s then-Director of Government Relations Mary Alice Baish met twice with Law Librarian of Congress Roberta Shaffer and Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.org to discuss Law.gov and Malamud’s idea for a national inventory of legal materials. The inventory would include legal materials from all three branches of government. Mary Alice volunteered our working groups to lead the ambitious effort to contribute to the groundbreaking national inventory. AALL would use this data to update AALL’s 2003 “State-by-State Report on Permanent Public Access to Electronic Government Information” and the 2007 “State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources” and 2009-2010 updates, which revealed that a significant number of state online legal resources are considered to be “official” but that few are authenticating. It would also help the Law Library of Congress, which owns the Law.gov domain name, with their own ambitious projects.

Erika Wayne and Paul Lomio at Stanford University’s Robert Crown Law Library developed a prototype for the national inventory that included nearly 30 questions related to scope, copyright, cost to access, and other use restrictions. They worked with the California State Working Group and the Northern California Association of Law Libraries to populate the inventory with impressive speed, adding most titles in about two months.

AALL’s Government Relations Office staff then expanded the California prototype to include questions related to digital authentication, preservation, and permanent public access. Our volunteers used the following definition of “authentication” provided by the Government Printing Office:

An authentic text is one whose content has been verified by a government entity to be complete and unaltered when compared to the version approved or published by the content originator.

Typically, an authentic text will bear a certificate or mark that conveys information as to its certification, the process associated with ensuring that the text is complete and unaltered when compared with that of the content originator.

An authentic text is able to be authenticated, which means that the particular text in question can be validated, ensuring that it is what it claims to be.

The “Principles and Core Values Concerning Public Information on Government Websites,” drafted by AALL’s Access to Electronic Legal Information Committee (now the Digital Access to Legal Information Committee) and adopted by the Executive Board in 2007, define AALL’s commitment to equitable, no-fee, permanent public access to authentic online legal information. The principle related to preservation states that:

Information on government Web sites must be preserved by the entity, such as a state library, an archives division, or other agency, within the issuing government that is charged with preservation of government information.

  • Government entities must ensure continued access to all their legal information.
  • Archives of government information must be comprehensive, including all supplements.
  • Snapshots of the complete underlying database content of dynamic Web sites should be taken regularly and archived in order to have a permanent record of all additions, changes, and deletions to the underlying data.
  • Governments must plan effective methods and procedures to migrate information to newer technologies.

In addition, AALL’s 2003 “State-By-State Report on Permanent Public Access to Electronic Government Information” defines permanent public access as, “the process by which applicable government information is preserved for current, continuous and future public access.”

Our volunteers used Google Docs to add to the inventory print and electronic legal titles at the state, county, and municipal levels and answer a series of questions about each title. AALL’s Government Relations Office set up a Google Group for volunteers to discuss issues and questions. Several of our state coordinators developed materials to help other working groups, such as Six Easy Steps to Populating Your State’s Inventory by Maine State Working Group coordinator Christine Hepler, How to Put on a Successful Work Day for Your Working Group by Florida State Working Group co-coordinators Jenny Wondracek and Jamie Keller, and Tips for AALL State Working Groups with contributions from many coordinators.

In October 2010, AALL held a very successful webinar on how to populate the inventories. More than 200 AALL and chapter members participated in the webinar, which included Kentucky State Working Group coordinator Emily Janoski-Haehlen, Maryland State Working Group coordinator Joan Bellistri, and Indiana State Working Group coordinator Sarah Glassmeyer as speakers. By early 2011, more than 350 volunteers were contributing to the state inventories.

Initial Findings

Our dedicated volunteers added more than 7,000 titles to the inventory in time for AALL’s June 30, 2011 deadline. AALL recognized our hard-working volunteers at our annual Advocacy Training during AALL’s Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, and celebrated their significant accomplishments. Timothy L. Coggins, 2010-11 Chair of the Digital Access to Legal Information Committee, presented these preliminary findings:

  • Authentication: No state reported new resources that have been authenticated since the 2009-2010 Digital Access to Legal Information Committee survey
  • Official status: Several states have designated at least one legal resource as official, including Arizona, Florida, and Maine
  • Copyright assertions in digital version: Twenty-five states assert copyright on at least one legal resource, including Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island
  • Costs to access official version: Ten states charge fees to access the official version, including Kansas, Vermont, and Wyoming
  • Preservation and Permanent Public Access: Eighteen states require preservation and permanent public access of at least one legal resource, including Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington

Analyzing and Using the Data

In July 2011, AALL’s Digital Access to Legal Information Committee formed a subcommittee that is charged with reviewing the national inventory data collected by the state working groups. The subcommittee includes Elaine Apostola (Maine State Law and Legislative Reference Library), A. Hays Butler (Rutgers University Law School Library), Sarah Gotschall (University of Arizona Rogers College of Law Library), and Anita Postyn (Richmond Supreme Court Library). Subcommittee members have been reviewing the raw data as entered by the working group volunteers in their state inventories. They will soon focus their attention on developing a report that will also act as an updated version of AALL’s State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources.

The report, to be issued later this year, will once again support what law librarians have known for years: there are widespread issues with access to legal resources and there is an imminent need to prevent a trend of eliminating print resources in favor of electronic resources without the proper safeguards in place. It will also include information on: the official status of legal resources; whether states are providing for authentication, permanent public access, and/or preservation of online legal resources; any use restrictions or copyright claims by the state; and whether a universal (public domain) citation format has been adopted by any courts in the state.

In addition to providing valuable information to the Law Library of Congress and related Law.gov projects, this information has already been helpful to various groups as they proceed to advocate for no-fee, permanent public access to government information. The data has already been useful to advocates of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act and will continue to be valuable to those seeking introduction and enactment in their states. The inventory has been used as a starting point for organizations that are beginning digitization projects of their state legal materials. The universal citation data will be used to track the progress of courts recognizing the value of citing official online legal materials through adopting a public domain citation system. Many state working group coordinators have also shared data with their judiciaries and legislatures to help expose the need for taking steps to protect our state legal materials.

The Next Steps: Federal Inventory

In December 2010, we launched the second phase of this project, the Federal Inventory. The Federal Inventory will include:

  • Legal research materials
  • Information authored or created by agencies
  • Resources that are publicly accessible

Our goals are the same as with the state inventories: to identify and answer questions about print and electronic legal materials from all three branches of government. Volunteers from Federal agencies and the courts are already adding information such as decisions, reports and digests (Executive); court opinions, court rules, and Supreme Court briefs (Judicial); and bills and resolutions, the Constitution, and Statutes at Large (Legislative). Emily Carr, Senior Legal Research Specialist at the Law Library of Congress, and Judy Gaskell, retired Librarian of the Supreme Court, are coordinating this project.

Thanks to the contributions of an army of AALL and chapter volunteers, the national inventory of legal materials is nearly complete. Keep an eye on AALL’s website for more information as our volunteers complete the Federal Inventory, analyze the data, and promote the findings to Federal, state and local officials.

Tina S. Ching is the Electronic Services Librarian at Seattle University School of Law. She is the 2011-12 Chair of the AALL Digital Access to Legal Information Committee.

 

Emily Feltren is Director of Government Relations for the American Association of Law Libraries.

 
 

[Editor's Note: For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see: Barbara Bintliff, The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Is Ready for Legislative Action; Jason Eiseman, Time to Turn the Page on Print Legal Information; John Joergensen, Authentication of Digital Repositories.]

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

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