Over in VoxPopuLII today, we published a guest piece on the visualization of parliamentary information by Aspasia Papaloi and Dimitris Gouscos from the University of Athens. It’s a great (worldwide) overview of the subject, with lots of useful links to other work done in the field. Take a look.
LII Announce
We're hiring
The LII is hiring a new systems administrator. We’re looking for a combination of old-school configuration-management, maintenance and troubleshooting skills alongside creativity and newfangled notions about building a sophisticated infrastructure to support Semantic Web publishing and Linked Data. The environment is fast-paced, demanding, infested with smart people, and very much about learning to fly planes while flying planes. It’s also whatever the opposite of “impersonal” is, and usually fun.
Come join us in Ithaca. The formal job description and application are here.
New mini-site on the SCOTUS healthcare cases
Most of you will have seen this tweeted by now, but our LIIBULLETIN crew has put together a mini-site on the healthcare cases being argued at the Supreme Court in two weeks. It’s at http://blog.law.cornell.edu/healthcarecases . We think it’s informative, and we hope you will too.
The LII is hiring
We’re looking for a software developer who can help us build out our collections into the world of Linked Data. We intend to offer both user-facing services that leverage Semantic Web techniques, and back-end services that will allow others to power their applications with LII technology. We would like you to be familiar with a variety of text-processing techniques including XML and XML tools such as xQuery and the eXist database server, RDF, SPARQL, and native RDF stores such as AllegroGraph and Jena, standards like SKOS. Drupal and Ajax skills are of course useful, as is anything to do with scripting languages (these days we’re using Ruby for most factory work and PHP/Drupal on the server side).
Most of all we’re looking for a developer who’s intellectually curious, ready to learn new stuff, and eager and able to work with legal information as part of a top-flight team.
The formal job description is here: http://liicr.nl/A2n6v3 .
Regime change at VoxPopuLII
On January 1, the editor-in-chief position at the LII’s VoxPopuLII blog changed hands. Rob Richards, whose incredible work over the last two and a half years has defined VoxPop as an important resource for anyone working in legal informatics, has decided to devote more time to his PhD studies at Penn State. Somehow, he continues to read, understand, and tweet everything in the field, thus giving weight to some of the wilder theories about him (one of the more popular ones is that he is really Thomas Pynchon, and also never sleeps). We are immensely grateful to him.
Rob is succeeded by two people: Stephanie Davidson (currently at the University of Illinois) and Christine Kirchberger (from Stockholm University). Each will be familiar to VoxPop readers from their earlier posts, and we are delighted that they have agreed to take the helm.
Stephanie earned her J.D. at Notre Dame Law School and her M.L.S. from Indiana University. After 5 years of reference and instruction at Yale Law School, Stephanie returned to the midwest to be Head of Public Services at the University of Illinois College of Law Library, where she has been since 2005. Her current scholarship focuses on informing law librarianship through a greater understanding of the research methods and practice of legal scholars and other legal researchers.
Christine Kirchberger earned her Law Degree from the University of Vienna, Austria, in 1997. In 2001 she joined the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (IRI) at Stockholm University. Christine has been teaching legal informatics to law students and computer scientists, both in Sweden and at King’s College in London, England. Since 2006 she has been writing her doctoral thesis ‘Legal Information as a Tool’ focusing on legal information retrieval, the concept of legal information and the information-seeking behaviour of lawyers. In 2010 she authored Cyber Law in Sweden, as part of Kluwer’s International Encyclopaedia for Cyber Law.
We’re feeling a little guilty about this belated announcement… and trust that you’ll join us in welcoming Stephanie and Christine. We’re looking forward to their contributions!
Supreme Court oral arguments for the week of October 10
It’s a short week for the Supremes this week — Monday is a legal holiday — but they’ll be hearing 5 new cases on Tuesday and Wednesday:
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
- 10-507 PACIFIC OPERATORS OFFSHORE v. VALLADOLID, LUISA L., ET AL.
- 10-637 GREENE, ERIC v. FISHER, SUPT., SMITHFIELD
- 10-948 COMPUCREDIT CORP., ET AL. v. GREENWOOD, WANDA, ET AL.
By the way, if you ever have questions about upcoming oral arguments, you can find a complete listing here, with links to docketing information and to the LIIBULLETIN analyses as they become available.
SCOTUS begins the October 2011 term
Today is the first day of the new Supreme Court term. This week the Court hears cases on topics ranging from copyright to habeas corpus and the registration of sex offenders. Here’s the calendar; as always, you can read our LII Supreme Court Bulletin case analyses by clicking on the name of the case:
Monday, October 3, 2011
- 09-958 MAXWELL-JOLLY, DAVID v. INDEP. LIVING CENTER OF S. CA
- 10-6549REYNOLDS, BILLY J. v. UNITED STATES
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
- 10-1001 MARTINEZ, LUIS M. v. RYAN, DIR., AZ DOC
- 10-63 MAPLES, CORY R. v. MAPLES, INTERIM COMM’R, AL DOC
- 10-680 HOWES, WARDEN v. FIELDS, RANDALL L.