We are pleased to announce the full slate of speakers and presentations for the 2012 Law via the Internet Conference, to be held October 7-9, 2012, at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York. The quality of the proposals we received was very high, and our Track Chairs had a difficult time narrowing down the limited number of presentations we were able to accept. We think you’ll agree that this year’s program is among the most comprehensive we have ever assembled and reflects the true diversity of disciplines and subjects that keeps the open access movement thriving after 20 years.

This year, we’ve invited several special guests, who have inspired us with their work in this new age of information and interaction. We’re excited to welcome legal technology innovator Richard Susskind and social media visionary Clay Shirky as our keynote speakers. We’ve also announced our featured headiners for each Conference Track, including GovLoop.com founder Steve Ressler, legal information analyst David Curle, head of the United Nations DESA in Rome Gherardo Casini, GovTrack.us founder Joshua Tauberer, and Google Scholar founding engineer Anurag Acharya.

We remember when social networking meant more than just Facebook, so we’ve created several special opportunities to mingle and celebrate our 20th Anniversary, including opening and closing receptions and our spectacular 20th Anniversary Gala. We also hope you’ll consider extending your trip to discover all that the beautiful Finger Lakes region has to offer. If you’re bringing guests who will not be attending the conference sessions, we’ve arranged special day trips for them and a reduced conference fee so that they can join you at the receptions and gala.

Now is the time to make your plans! Reserve your space before June 15 to enjoy significant savings on the conference registration fees. We also suggest you make travel and lodging reservations as soon as you can; flights to Ithaca and hotel rooms for this event will fill up quickly.

Follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest news and information, and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to write to us as info@lvi2012.org. We look forward to seeing you in October.

The  Court hears 4 cases this week. One hot topic being discussed includes immigration law and border control in Arizona v. United States. Can Arizona engage in cooperative enforcement of federal immigration laws and create state offenses for violations of federal immigration regulations? Also this week is a case on whether the Quiet Title Act applies to cases in which the plaintiff’s interest in divesting the title is something other than a claim of ownership to the land.

Monday, April 23, 2012

This week the Court hears cases involving some of our favorite acts like The Fair Labor Standards Act, the Fair Sentencing Act, and the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed a comprehensive health care reform bill into law: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). A number of states and organizations challenged the law in federal court.  Those lawsuits made their way through the courts, leading up to the current Supreme Court review of the law. Perhaps signaling the importance of the health care law to this Court, the Supreme Court has set aside an unprecedented three days, March 26-28, to hear arguments on both sides on the issues.

Monday, March 26, 2012

• 11-398    DEPT. OF H&HS, ET AL. v.FLORIDA, ET AL.

This week the court hears some interesting arguments, one including a woman that used her deceased husbands frozen sperm to conceive and is now having trouble collecting his Social Security benefits for their children. Two cases on whether it is cruel and unusual punishment to sentence teenagers to life without parole even if they aren’t the triggermen. Plus are there really any “harmless-errors” in court if it leads to your conviction?

Monday, March 19, 2012

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.

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 .

The Supreme Court hears 4 this week. In the mix are cases involving double jeopardy and capital murder, real estate settlement services and kickbacks, compensation of interpreters and court costs, and lying about military awards. Is it a crime, or protected free speech?

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!