Elaine Svenonius’ Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization was the book that finally clued us in to what librarianship is really about. Highly recommended, especially for computer types trying to figure out the habits of this exotic life form.
Some of us here at the LII are already looking forward to the 9th International Law via the Internet Conference in October 2008. Part of the reason — but only part of the reason, really! — is that the Conference will be held in Florence, Italy, the home town of its host, L’Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica (the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques). We met the ITTIG folks for the first time last year at the conference in Montreal, and we found them to be fun and knowledgeable colleagues. We have much in common and much to learn from each other, and the conference will be a good chance to talk more about what we can work on together.
The International Law and the Internet Conference is an annual event of the Legal Information Institute network that explores progress and emerging problems related to new technologies and law. Cornell’s Legal Information Institute was the first LII, but since we began operation in 1992 the name has been widely adopted by other projects that also provide free online access to legal information. The meeting in Florence will focus on ways in which the use of new technologies can become an irreplaceable tool of democracy for the citizens of the e-society.
Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals.
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527): Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, trans. Allan Gilbert, book 1, chapter 18, p. 241 (1965).
Current federal law designates Memorial Day as the last Monday in May — in 2008 that’s today, May 26th. It was officially proclaimed as Decoration Day on May 5, 1868 by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in his General Order No. 11. It was first observed on May 30, 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. By 1890 it was recognized by all of the northern states, but the South did not observe Decoration Day, preferring to honor their dead on separate days until after World War I. In 1882, the name was changed to Memorial Day and soldiers who had died in other wars were also honored.
140 years later, Memorial Day is still celebrated at Arlington National Cemetery with a ceremony in which a small American flag is placed on each grave and a wreath is laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. But today, there other, less historic, ways to pay your respects; there are picnics, parades and fireworks — or you can skin your phone with an American flag.
The power of the President of the United States or a state governor to pardon a criminal or to commute a sentence. The term itself means “leniency” or “mercy.” see, e.g. Herrera v. Collins, 506 US 390 (1993). See also Criminal law.
A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.
Thomas Jefferson. Letter to John B. Colvin, September 20, 1810, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, vol. 9, p. 279 (1898).
George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind is one of those books that breaks ground where nobody knew there was ground. Read it alongside some of Robert Berring’s work (for instance, Legal Research and the World of Thinkable Thoughts) and you’ll never look at West key numbers the same way again.
It’s probably just a sign that the general frivolity level here at the LII is way too high, but we are prone to confuse the Lakoff book with Ricky Jay’s Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, which is a fine book too, though not up to his Cards as Weapons.
Since he’s in town for the dg.o conference in Montreal this week, LII director Tom Bruce is taking the opportunity to visit old friends at CanLII. CanLII was the first “namesake” organization to adopt the LII name in the mid-90’s, and has grown into the definitive open-access national law resource for Canada. It’s relied on by all Canadian lawyers — who, incidentally, support the service through fees collected directly by their Bar Association.Bruce will be giving a small seminar for the CanLII staff. He plans to talk about the relationship between repositories that are relatively rich in subject-specific metadata — like the LII and CanLII — and search engines of general application, like Google. The trick is to figure out how to provide a seamless and enriched search process for people who first access our web sites via the large public search engines, but could then enjoy faster and more accurate searching using localized, specialized search. It is unlikely, however, that a sharp and curious crew like the CanLII folks will stick to the topic — an exploration that will be fun, educational, and productive for all involved.
Tom Bruce, the LII’s director, and the multidisciplinary team from CeRI (Bruce, Cynthia Farina, Claire Cardie, and Steve Purpura) are giving workshops and presentations at the Digital Government (dg.o) 2008 conference in Montreal this week.Bruce is co-chairing a workshop entitled “e-rulemaking at the crossroads”. The workshop will consist of presentations from a variety of research teams working in the area of electronic rulemaking: public participation in the notice-and-comment process by which Federal regulations are constructed and reviewed. Presentations range from the policy-oriented to the very, very technical — e-rulemaking is a very useful place to do research in advanced language technologies and machine learning. The policy work draws heavily on Bruce and Farina’s service on the ABA Section of Administrative Law’s Special Committee on the Future of e-Rulemaking, for which Farina is reporter.
On Tuesday, Farina and Purpura will each present papers entitled (respectively) “A Study in Text Categorization for e-rulemaking” and “Active Learning for e-Rulemaking”. The former will present research results from work done with rulemakings from the Department of Transportation and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industrial Security. The latter is a very technical paper comparing the accuracy of different categorization algorithms used to match comments to a taxonomy of issues raised by the regulation. Not, perhaps, the easiest thing to understand, because there’s lots of scary math involved — but a valuable first step toward increased public participation in the regulatory process.
We’re already learning a lot from people at other institutions. Particularly interesting is Peter Muhlberger‘s project at Texas Tech, some work on ontologies from Carnegie Mellon, and a paper on segmenting SEC filings that looks as though it describes useful techniques for getting better metadata out of Federal Court decisions — all of which can lead to new and better services from the LII.
Yesterday — May 18th — was the anniversary of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 US Supreme Court case that upheld a Louisiana state law requiring separate railway cars for blacks and whites. The Court found that separate facilities satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution so long as they were equal. The separate-but-equal doctrine remained good law in the United States until it was finally repudiated by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education — decided 58 years later, on May 17, 1954.
In Brown v. Board of Education, the Court held that state laws that established separate public schools for black and white
students violated the Fourteen Amendment by denying black children equal educational opportunities. The case was a judicial watershed that eventually dismantled the legal basis for racial segregation in schools and other public facilities, and laid the foundation for the civil rights movement.
