25 for 25: Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

25-for-25, free access to law, Public access to legal information 3 Responses »

Jan 172017

[ Note: This year marks the LII’s 25th year of operation. In honor of the occasion, we’re going to offer “25 for 25” — blog posts by 25 leading thinkers in the field of open access to law and legal informatics, published here in the VoxPopuLII blog. Submissions will appear irregularly, approximately twice per month. We’ll open with postings from the LII’s original co-directors, and conclude with posts from the LII’s future leadership. Today’s post is by Tom Bruce; Peter Martin’s will follow later in the month.]

It all started with two gin-and-tonics, consumed by a third party. At the time I was the Director of Educational Technologies for the Cornell Law School. Every Friday afternoon, there was a small gathering of people like me in the bar of the Statler Hotel, maybe 8 or 10 from different holes and corners in Cornell’s computer culture. A lot of policy issues got solved there, and more than a few technical ones. I first heard about something called “Perl” there.

The doyen of that group was Steve Worona, then some kind of special-assistant-for-important-stuff in the office of Cornell’s VP for Computing. Knowing that the law school had done some work with CD-ROM based hypertext, he had been trying to get me interested in a Campus-Wide Information System (CWIS) platform called Gopher and, far off into the realm of wild-eyed speculation, this thing called the World-Wide Web. One Friday in early 1992, noting that Steve was two gin-and-tonics into a generous mood, I asked him if he might have a Sun box laying around that I might borrow to try out a couple of those things.

He did, and the Sun 4-c in question became fatty.law.cornell.edu — named after Fatty the Bookkeeper, a leading character in the Brecht-Weill opera “Mahagonny”, which tells the story of a “City of Nets”. It was the first institutional web server that had information about something other than high-energy physics, and somewhere around the 30th web server in the world. We still get a fair amount of traffic via links to “fatty”, though the machine name has not been in use for a decade and a half (in fact, we maintain a considerable library of redirection code so that most of the links that others have constructed to us over a quarter-century still work).

What did we put there? First, a Gopher server. Gopher pages were either menus or full text — it was more of a menuing system than full hypertext, and did not permit internal links. Our first effort — Peter’s idea — was Title 17 of the US Code, whose structure was an excellent fit with Gopher’s capabilities, and whose content (copyright) was an excellent fit with the obsessions of those who had Internet access in those days. It got a lot of attention, as did Peter’s first shot at a Supreme Court opinion in HTML form, Two Pesos v. Taco Cabana.

Other things followed rapidly, and later that year we began republishing all Supreme Court opinions in electronic form. Initially we linked to the Cleveland Freenet site; then we began republishing them from text in ATEX format; later we were to add our own Project Hermes subscription. Not long after we began publishing, I undertook to develop the first-ever web browser for Microsoft Windows — mostly because at the time it seemed unlikely that anyone else would, anytime soon. We were just as interested in editorial innovations. Our first legal commentary — then called “Law About…..”, and now WEX, was put together in 1993, based on work done by Peter and by Jim Milles in constructing a topics list useful to both lawyers and the general public. A full US Code followed in 1994. Our work with CD-ROM continued for a surprisingly long time — we offered statutory supplements and leading Supreme Court cases on CD for a number of years, and our version of Title 26 was the basis for a CD distributed by the IRS into the new millennium. Back in the day when there was, plausibly, a book called “The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog”, we appeared in it eight times.

To talk about the early days solely in terms of technical firsts or Internet-publishing landmarks is, I think, to miss the more important parts of what we did. First, as Peter Martin remarks in a promotional video that we made several years ago, we showed that there was tremendous potential for law schools to become creative spaces for innovation in all things related to legal information (they still have that tremendous potential, though very few are exercising it). We used whatever creativity we could muster to break the stranglehold of commercial publishers not just on legal publishing as a product, but also on thinking about how law should be published, and where, and for whom. In those days, it was all about caselaw, all about lawyers, and a mile wide and an inch deep. Legal academia, and the commercial publishers, were preoccupied with caselaw and with the relative prestige and authority of courts that publish it; they did not seem to imagine that there was a need for legal information outside the community of legal practitioners. We thought, and did, differently.

We were followed in that by others, first in Canada, and then in Australia, and later in a host of other places. Many of those organizations — around 20 among them, I think — have chosen to use “LII” as part of their names, and “Legal Information Institute” has become a kind of brand name for open access to law. Many of our namesakes offer comprehensive access to the laws of their countries, and some are de facto official national systems. Despite recurring fascination with the idea of a “free Westlaw”, a centralized free-to-air system has never been a practical objective for an academically-based operation in the United States. We have, from the outset, seen our work as a practical exploration of legal information technology, especially as it facilitates integration and aggregation of numerous providers. The ultimate goal has been to develop new methods that will help people — all people, lawyers or not — find and understand the law, without fees.

It was obvious to us from the start that effective work in this area would require deep, equal-status collaboration between legal experts and technologists, beginning with the two of us. My collaboration with Peter was the center of my professional life for 20 years. I was lucky to have the opportunity. Legal-academic culture and institutions are often indifferent or hostile to such collaborations, and they are far rarer and much harder to maintain than they should be. These days, it’s all the rage to talk about “teaching lawyers to code”. I think that lawyers would get better results if they would learn to communicate and collaborate with those who already know how.

Finally, we felt then – as we do now – that the best test of ideas was to implement them in practical, full-scale systems offered to the public in all its Internet-based, newfound diversity. The resulting work, and the LII itself, have been defined by the dynamism of opposites — technological expertise vs. legal expertise, practical publishing vs. academic research, bleeding-edge vs. when-the-audience-is-ready, an audience of lawyers vs. an audience of non-lawyer professionals and private citizens. That is a complicated, multidirectional balancing act — but we are still on the high-wire after 25 years, and that balancing act has been the most worthwhile thing about the organization, and one that will enable a new set of collaborators to do many more important things in the years to come.

Thomas R. Bruce is the Director of the Legal Information Institute, which he co-founded with Peter W. Martin in 1992.

Constitutions as Summer Reading

comparative, Digital law libraries, Electronic legal publishing, free law data, Legal text processing, Linked Data No Responses »

Oct 012015

Two years ago my collaborators and I introduced a new resource for understanding constitutions. We call it Constitute. It’s a web application that allows users to extract excerpts of constitutional text, by topic, for nearly every constitution in the world currently in force. One of our goals is to shed some of the drudgery associated with reading legal text. Unlike credit card contracts, Constitutions were meant for reading (and by non-lawyers). We have updated the site again, just in time for summer (See below). Curl up in your favorite retreat with Constitute this summer and tell us what you think.

Some background: Constitute is built primarily for those engaged in the challenge of drafting constitutions, which occurs more frequently than some think (4-5 constitutions are replaced each year and many more are revised in smaller ways). Drafters often want to view examples of text from a representative set of countries – mostly so that they can understand the multiple dimensions of a particular area of law. Of course, scholars and educators will also find many uses for the data. After all, the resource grew out of an effort to study constitutions, not write them.

How does Constitute differ from other constitutional repositories? The core advantage of Constitute is the ability to view constitutional excerpts by topic. These topics are derived from the conceptual inventory of constitutions that my collaborators and I have been developing and refining over the last ten years as part of the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP). The intent of that project is to record the content of the world’s constitutions in order to answer questions about the origins and effects of various constitutional provisions. In order to build that dataset (CCP), we invested quite a bit of time in (1) identifying when constitutions in each country had been enacted, revised, or replaced, (2) tracking down the texts associated with each of these changes, (3) digitizing and archiving the texts, (4) building the conceptual apparatus to extract information about their content, and finally, (5) reading and interpreting the texts. We leveraged all of this information in building Constitute.

We are committed to refining and elaborating Constitute. Our recent release includes some exciting developments, some of which I describe here.

Now in Arabic! Until now, Constitute’s texts have been in English. However, we believe (with some evidence) that readers strongly prefer to read constitutions in their native language. Thus, with a nod to the constitutional activity borne of the Arab Spring, we have introduced a fully functioning Arabic version of the site, which includes a subset of Constitute’s texts. Thanks here to our partners at International IDEA, who provided valuable intellectual and material resources.

Form and function. One distinction of Constitute is the clarity and beauty of its reading environment. Constitutional interpretation is hard enough as it is. Constitute’s texts are presented in a clean typeset environment that facilitates and invites reading, not sleep and irritability. In the latest release, we introduce a new view of the data — a side-by-side comparison of two constitutions. While in our usual “list view,” you can designate up to eight constitutions for inclusion in the comparison set, once in “compare view,” you can choose any two from that set for side-by-side viewing. In compare view, you’ll find our familiar search bar and topic menu in the left panel to drive and refine the comparison. By default, compare view displays full constitutions with search results highlighted and navigable (if there are multiple results). Alternatively, you can strip away the content and view selected excerpts in isolation by clicking the button at the right of the texts. It is an altogether new, and perhaps better, way to compare texts.

Sharing and analyzing. Many users will want to carve off slices of data for digestion elsewhere. In that sense, scholars and drafting committees alike will appreciate that the site was built by and for researchers. Exporting is painless. Once you pin the results, you can export to a .pdf file or to Google Docs to collaborate with your colleagues. You can also export pinned results to a tabulated .csv file, which will be convenient for those of you who want to manage and analyze the excerpts using your favorite data applications. Not only that, but our “pin search” and “pin comparison” functions allow analysts to carve large slices of data and deposit them in the Pinned page for scaled-up analysis.

Raw data downloads. For those of you who build web applications or are interested in harnessing the power of Linked Data, we have exposed our linked data as a set of downloads and as a SPARQL endpoint, for people and machines to consume. Just follow the Data link on “More Info” in the left panel of the site.

And then there is “deep linking,” so that you can export your pinned results and share them as documents and datafiles. But you can also share excerpts, searches, comparisons, and full constitutions very easily in your direct communications. The most direct way is to copy the URL. All URLs on the site are now deep links, which means that anything you surface on the site is preserved in that URL forever (well, “forever” by internet standards). Suppose you are interested in those constitutions that provide for secession (Scotland and Catalunya have many thinking along those lines). Here are those results to share in your blog post, email, Wikipedia entry, or publication. By the way, do you know which constitutions mention the word “internet?” Chances are you’ll be surprised.

So, please take Constitute with you to the beach this summer and tell us what you think. Any comments or suggestions to the site should be directed to our project address, constitute.project@gmail.com.

Zachary Elkins is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include constitutional design, democracy, and Latin American politics. He co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

Legal Research Ontology, Part II

Legal ontologies, legal research No Responses »

Aug 202015

My blog post last year about developing a legal research ontology was such an optimistic (i.e., naive), linear narrative. This was one of my final notes:

At this point, I am in the beginning stages of taking advantage of all the semantic web has to offer. The ontology’s classes now have subclasses. I am building the relationships between the classes and subclasses and using Protege to bring them all together.

I should have known better.

What I didn’t realize then was that I really didn’t understand anything about the semantic web. While I could use the term in a sentence and reference RDF and OWL and Protege, once you scratched the surface I was lost. Based on Sara Frug’s recommendation during a presentation at CALI Con 2014, I started reading Semantic Web for Dummies.

It has been, and continues to be, slow going. I don’t have a computer science or coding background, and so much of my project feels like trying to teach myself a new language without immersion or much of a guide. But the process of this project has become just as interesting to me as the end product. How are we equipped to teach ourselves anything? At a certain point, you just have to jump in and do something, anything, to get the project moving.

I had already identified the classes:
* Type of research material;
* Type of research problem;
* Source of law;
* Area of law;
* Legal action; and
* Final product.

I knew that each class has subclasses. Yet in my readings, as I learned how ontologies are used for constructing relationships between entities, I missed the part where I had to construct relationships between the entities. They didn’t just magically appear when you enter the terms into Protege.

I’m using Web Protege, an open-source product developed by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, using the OWL ontology language.

Ontology engineering is a hot topic these days, and there is a growing body of papers, tutorials, and presentations on OWL and ontology engineering. That’s also part of the problem: There’s a little too much out there. I knew that anything I would do with my ontology would happen in Protege, so I decided to start there with the extensive user documentation and user support. Their user guide takes you through setting up your first ontology with step-by-step illustrations and a few short videos. I also discovered a tutorial on the web titled Pizzas in 10 minutes.

Following the tutorial, you construct a basic ontology of pizza using different toppings and sauces. While it took me longer than 10 minutes to complete, it did give me enough familiarity with constructing relationships to take a stab at it with my ontology and its classes. Here’s what I came up with:

This representation doesn’t list every subclass; e.g., in Types of research material, I only listed primary source and in Area of law, I only listed contracts, torts and property. But it gives you an idea of how the classes relate to each other. Something I learned in building the sample pizza ontology in Protege is the importance of creating two properties: the relational “_property and the modifier_” property. The recommendation is to use has or is as prefixes1 for the properties. You can see how classes relate to each other in the above diagram as well as how classes are modified by subclasses and individuals.

I’m continuing to read Semantic Web for Dummies, and I’m currently focusing on Chapter 8: Speaking the Web Ontology Language. It has all kinds of nifty Venn diagrams and lines of computer code, and I’m working on understanding it all. This line keeps me going. However, if you’re looking for a system to draw inferences or to interpret the implications of your assertions (for example, to supply a dynamic view of your data), OWL is for you2.

One of my concerns is that a few of my subclasses belong to more than class. But the beauty of the Semantic web and OWL is that class and subclass are dynamic sets, and when you run the ontology individual members can change from one set to another. This means that Case Law can be both a subclass of Source of Law and an instance of Primary Source in the class Type of Research Material.

The way in which I set up my classes, subclasses, and the relationships between them are simple assertions3. Two equivalent classes would look like a enn diagram with the two sets as completely overlapping. This helps in dealing with synonyms. You can assert equivalence between individuals as well as classes, but it is better to set up each individual’s relationships with its classes, and then let the OWL reasoning system decide if the individuals are truly interchangeable. This is very helpful in a situation in which you are combining ontologies. There are more complicated assertions (equivalence, disjointness, and subsumption), and I am working on applying them and building out the ontology.

Next I need to figure out the characteristics of the properties relating the classes, subclasses, and individuals in my ontology: inverse, symmetric, transitive, intersection, union, complement, and restriction. As I continue to read (and reread) Semantic Web for Dummies, I am gaining a new appreciation for set theory and descriptive logic. Math seems to always have a way of finding you! I am also continuing to fill in the ontology with terms (using simple assertions), and I also need to figure out SPARQL so I can query the ontology. It still feels like one of those one step forward, two steps back endeavors, but it is interesting.

I hope to keep you posted, and I am grateful to the Vox PopuLII blog for having me back to write an update.

Amy Taylor is the Access Services Librarian and Adjunct Professor at American University Washington College of Law. Her main research interests are legal ontologies, organization of legal information and the influence of online legal research on the development of precedent. You can reach her on Twitter @taylor_amy or email: amytaylor@wcl.american.edu.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

—
1 Matthew Horridge, A Practical Guide to Building OWL Ontologies, 20, http://phd.jabenitez.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/A-Practical-Guide-To-Building-OWL-Ontologies-Using-Protege-4.pdf (last visited May 19, 2015.

2 Jeffrey Pollock, Semantic Web for Dummies 195 (Wiley 2009).

3 Id. at 200.

Folksonomies & Law - Background issues and theoretical perspectives

information retrieval, knowledge management, Law libraries, Legal knowledge management, Legal ontologies, Legal semantic web, Semantic Web and law, Taxonomies 3 Responses »

Nov 272014

§.1.- Foreword

«If folksonomies work for pictures (Flickr), books (Goodreads), questions and answers (Quora), basically everything else (Delicious), why shouldn’t they work for law?» (Serena Manzoli)

In a post on this blog, Serena Manzoli distinguishes three uses of taxonomies in law: (1) for research of legal documents, (2) in teaching to law students, and (3) for its practical application.

In regard to her first point, she notes that (observation #1) to increase the availability of legal resources is compelling change of the whole information architecture, and – correctly, in my opinion – she exposes some objections to the heuristic efficiency of folksonomies: (objection #1) they are too “flat” to constitute something useful for legal research and (objection #2) it is likely that non-expert users could “pollute” the set of tags. Notwithstanding these issues, she states (prediction #1) that folksonomies could be helpful with non-legal users.

On the second point, she notes (observation #2) that folksonomies could be beneficial to study the law, because they could allow one to penetrate easier into its conceptual frameworks; she also formulates the hypothesis (prediction #2) that this teaching method could shape a more flexible mindset in students.

In discussing the third point, she notes (observation #3) that different taxonomies entail different ways of apply the law, and (prediction #3) she formulates the hypothesis that, in a distant perspective in which folksonomies would replace taxonomies, the result would be a whole new way to apply the law.

I appreciated Manzoli’s post and accepted with pleasure the invitation of Christine Kirchberger – to whom I am grateful – to share my views with the readers of this prestigious blog. Hereinafter I intend to focus on the theoretical profiles that aroused my curiosity. My position is partly different from that of Serena Manzoli.

§.2.- Introduction

In order to detect the issues stemming from folksonomies, I think it is relevant to give some preliminary clarifications.

In collective tagging systems, by tagging we can describe the content of an object – an image, a song or a document – label it using any lexical expression preceded by the “hashtag” (the symbol “#”) and share it with our friends and followers or also recommend it to an audience of strangers.

Folksonomies (blend of the words “taxonomy” and “folk”) are sets of categories resulting from the use of tags in the description of on line resources by the users, allowing a “many to many” connection between tags, users and resources.

Basic pattern of a folksonomy

Thomas Vander Wal coined the word a decade ago – ten years is really a long time in ICTs – and these technologies, as reported by Serena Manzoli, have now been adopted in most of the social networks and e-commerce systems.

The main feature of folksonomies is that tags aggregate spontaneously in a semantic core; therefore, they are often associated with taxonomies or ontologies, although in these latter cases hierarchies and categories are established before the collection of data, as “a priori”.

Simplifying, I can say that tags may describe three aspects of the resources, using particulars (i.e. a picture of a flowerpot lit by the sun):

(1) The content of the resources (i.e. #flowers),

(2) The interaction with other specific resources and the environment in general (i.e. #sun or #summer),

(3) The effect that these resources have on users having access to them (i.e. #beautiful).

Since it seems to me that none of these aspects should be disregarded in an overall assessment of folksonomies, I will consider all of them.

Having regard to law, they end to match with these three major issues:

(1) Law as a “content”. Users select legal documents among others available and choose those that seem most relevant. As a real interest is – normally – the driving criterion of the search, and as this typically is given by the need to solve a legal problem, I designate this profile with the expression «Quid juris?».

(2) Law as a “concept”. This problem emerges because the single legal document can not be conceived separately from the context in which it appears, namely the relations it has with the legal system to which it belongs. Consequently becomes inevitable to ask what the law is, as a common feature of all legal documents. Recalling Immanuel Kant in the “Metaphysics of Morals”, here I use the expression «Quid jus?».

(3) Law as a “sentiment”. What emerges in folksonomies is a subjective attitude that regards the meaning to be attributed to the research of resources and that affects the way in which it is performed. To this I intend to refer using the expression «Cur jus?».

§.3.- Folksonomies, Law, and «Quid juris?»: legal information management and collective tagging systems

In this respect, I agree definitely with Serena Manzoli. Folksonomies seem to open very interesting perspectives in the field of legal information management; we admit, however, that these technologies still have some limitations. For instance: just because the resources are tagged freely, it is difficult to use them to build taxonomies or ontologies; inexperienced users classify resources less efficiently than the other, diluting all the efforts of more skilled users and “polluting” well-established catalogs; vice versa, even experienced users can make mistakes in the allocation of tags, worsening the quality of information being shared.

Though in some cases these issues can be solved in several ways – i.e., the use of tags can be guided with the tag’s recommendation, hence the distinction between broad and narrow folksonomies – and even if it can reasonably be expected that these tools will work even better in the future, for now we can say that folksonomies are useful just to integrate pre-existing classifications.

I may add, as an example, that an Italian law requires the creation of “user-created taxonomies (folksonomies),” “Guidelines for websites of public administrations” of 29 July 2011, page 20. These guidelines have been issued pursuant to art. 4 of Directive 26th November 2009 n. 8, of the “Minister for Public Administration and Innovation”, according to the Legislative Decree of 7 March 2005, n. 82, “Digital Administration Code” (O.J. n. 112 of 16th May 2005, S.O. n. 93). It may be interesting to point out that in Italian law the innovation in administrative bodies is promoted by a specific institution, the Agency for Digital Italy (“Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale”), which coordinates the actions in this field and sets standards for usability and accessibility. Folksonomies indeed fall into this latter category.

Following this path, a municipality (Turin) has recently set up a system of “social bookmarking” for the benefit of citizens called TaggaTO.

§.4.- Folksonomies, Law, and «Quid jus?»: the difference between the “map” and the “territory”

In this regard, my theoretical approach is different from that of Serena Manzoli. Here is the reason our findings are opposite.

Human beings are “tagging animals”, since labelling things is a natural habit. We can note it in common life: each of us, indeed, organizes his environment at home (we have jars with “salt” or “pepper” written on the caps) and at work (we use folders with “invoices” or “bank account” printed on the cover). The significance of tags is obvious if we consider using it with other people: it allows us to establish and share a common information framework. For the same reasons of convenience, tags have been included in most of the software applications we use (documents, e-mail, calendars) and, as said above, in many online services. To sum up, labels help us to build a representation of reality: they are tools for our knowledge.

In regard to reality and knowledge, it may be recalled that in the twentieth century there were two philosophical perspectives: the “continental tradition”, focused on the first (reality) and pretty much common in Europe, and the “analytic philosophy”, centered on the second (knowledge and widespread among USA, UK and Scandinavia. More recently, this distinction has lost much of its heuristic value and we have seen rising a different approach, the “philosophy of information”, which proposes, developing some theoretical aspects of cybernetics, a synthesis of reality and knowledge in an unifying vision that originates from a naturalistic notion of “information”.

I will try to simplify, saying that if reality is a kind of “territory”, and if taxonomies (and in general ontologies) can be considered as a sort of representation of knowledge, then they can be considered as “maps”.

In light of these premises, I should explain what to me “sharing resources” and “shared knowledge” mean in folksonomies. Folksonomies are a kind of “map”, indeed, but different than ontologies. In a metaphor: ontologies could be seen as “maps” created by a single geographer overlapping the reliefs of many “territories”, and sold indiscriminately to travelers; folksonomies could be seen as “maps” that inhabitants of different territories help each other to draw by telephone or by texting a message. Both solutions have advantages and disadvantages: the former may be detailed but more difficult to consult, while the latter may be always updated but affected by inaccuracies. In this sense, folksonomies could be said “antifragile” – according to the brilliant metaphor of Nassim Nicholas Taleb – because their value improves with increased use, while ontologies could be seen as “fragile”, because of the linearity of the process of production and distribution.

Therefore, as the “map” is not the “territory”, reality does not change depending on the representation. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the “maps” are not helpful to travel to unknown “territories”, or to reach faster the destination even in “territories” that are well known (just like when driving in the car with the aid of GPS).

On the application of folksonomies to the field of law, I shall say that, after all, legal science has always been a kind of “natural folksonomy”. Indeed, it has always been a widespread knowledge, ready to be practiced, open to discussion, and above all perfectly “antifragile”: new legal issues to be solved determine a further use of the systems, thus causing an increase in knowledge and therefore a greater accuracy in the description of the legal domain. In this regard, Serena Manzoli in her post also mentioned the Corpus Juris Civilis, which for centuries has been crucial in the Western legal culture. Scholars went to Italy from all over Europe to study it, at the beginning by noting few elucidations in the margins of the text (glossatores), then commenting on what they had learned (commentatores), and using their legal competences to decide cases that were submitted to them as judges or to argue in trials as lawyers.

Modern tradition has refused all of this, imposing a rationalistic and rigorous view of law. This approach – “fragile”, continuing with the paradigm of Nassim Nicholas Taleb – has spread in different directions, which simplifying I can lower to three:

(1) Legal imperativism: law as embodied in the words of the sovereign.

Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes)

(2) Legal realism: law as embodied in the words of the judge.

Gavel

(3) Legal formalism: law as embodied in administrative procedures.

The Castle (Franz Kafka)

For too long we have been led to pretending to see only the “map” and to ignore the “territory”. In my opinion, the application of folksonomies to law can be very useful to overcome these prejudices emerging from the traditional legal positivism, and to revisit a concept of law that is a step closer to its origin and its nature. I wrote “a step closer”; I’d like to clarify, to emphasize that the “map”, even if obtained through a participatory process, remains a representation of the “territory”, and to suggest that the vision known as the “philosophy of information” seems an attempt to overlay or replace the two terms – hence its “naturalism” – rather than to draw a “map” as similar as possible to the “territory”.

§.5- Folksonomies, Law and «Cur jus?»: the user in folksonomies: from “anybody” to “somebody”

This profile does not fall within the topics covered in Manzoli’s post, but I would like to take this opportunity to discuss it because it is the most intriguing to me.

Each of us arranges his resources according to the meaning that he intends to give his world. Think of how each of us arrays the resources containing information that he needs in his work: the books on the desk of a scholar, the files on the bench of a lawyer or a judge, the documents in the archive of a company. We place things around us depending on the problem we have to address: we use the surrounding space to help us find the solution.

With folksonomies, in general, we simply do the same in a context in which the concept of “space” is just a matter of abstraction.

What does it mean? We organize things, then we create “information”. Gregory Bateson in a very famous book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind – in which he wrote on “maps” and “territories”, too – stated that “information” is “the difference that makes the difference”. This definition, brilliant in its simplicity, raises the tremendous problem of the meaning of our existence and the freedom of will. This issue can be explained through an example given by a very interesting app called “Somebody”, recently released by the contemporary artist Miranda July.

The app works as follows: a message addressed to a given person is written and transmitted to another, who delivers it verbally. In other words, the actual recipient receives the message from an individual who is unknown to him. The point that fascinates me is this: someone suddenly comes out to tell that you “make a difference,” that you are not “anybody” because you are “somebody” for “somebody.” Moreover, at the same time this same person, since he is addressing you, becomes “somebody,” because the sender of the message chose him among others, since he “meant something” to him.

For me, the meaning of this amazing app can be summed up in this simple equation:

“Being somebody” = “Mean something” = “Make a difference”

This formula means that each of us believes he is worth something (“being somebody”), that his life has a meaning (“mean something”), that his choices or actions can change something – even if slightly – in this world (“make a difference”).

Returning to Bateson, if it is important to each of us to “make a difference”, if we all want to be “somebody”, then how could we settle down for recognize ourselves as just an “organizing agent”? Self-consciousness is related to semantics and to the freedom of choice: who is not free at all, does not create any “difference” in the world. Poetically, Miranda July makes people talk to each other, giving a meaning to humanity and a purpose to freedom: this is what “making a difference” means for humans.

In applying folksonomies to law, we should consider all this. It is true that folksonomies record the way in which each user arrays available legal documents, but it should be emphasized the purpose for which this activity is carried out. Therefore, it should be clear that an efficient cataloguing of resources depends on several conditions: certainly that the user shall know the law and remember its ontologies, but also that he shall be focused on what he is doing. This means that the user needs to be well-motivated, in order to recognize the value of what he is doing, so that to give meaning to his activity.

§.6- Conclusion

I believe that folksonomies can teach us a lot. In them we can find not only an extraordinary technical tool, but also – and most importantly – a reason to overcome the traditional legal positivism – which is “ontological” and therefore “fragile” – and thus rediscover the cooperation not only among experts, but also with non-experts, in the name of an “antifragile” shared legacy of knowledge that is called “law”.

All this will work – or at least, it will work better – if we remember that we are human beings.

Federico Costantini.

I hold a Master’s degree in Law and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Law from the University of Padua (Italy).
Currently I am Researcher in Philosophy of Law (Legal informatics) in the Department of Legal sciences at the University of Udine (Italy).
My study aims to bridge philosophy, computer science and law, focusing on the strife between human nature and new technologies. Recently I am investigating the theoretical implications of ICTs on «social ontology», the concept of law as an instrument of social control as emerging from the «peer to peer economy», the use of folksonomies in legal information management and the theoretical aspects of Digital evidence.
I teach Legal Informatics in the Faculty of Law of Udine. In my lectures on cyberlaw, which I study since 2000, I bring out the critical profiles of the “Information Society” from the discussion of the most recent jurisprudence.
I am also a Lawyer. I am registered in the Bar Association of Udine (Italy) in a special section (full time academic researchers and professors).
My full profile can be visited on www.linkedin.com .
My complete list of publications can be found on https://air.uniud.it.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

Lessons Gained from Parliamentary Information Visualization (PIV)

Citizen participation in lawmaking, eparticipation, Legal knowledge representation, Legislative information systems, legislative transparency, Nonlawyers' legal information needs, visualization 1 Response »

Oct 302014

Lessons Gained from Parliamentary Information Visualization (PIV)

The emerging topic of Parliamentary Informatics (PI) has opened up new terrain in the research of the scope, usefulness and contribution of Informatics to parliamentary openness and legislative transparency. This is pretty interesting when visualizations are used as the preferred method in order to present and interpret parliamentary activity that seems complicated or incomprehensible to the public. In fact, this is one of the core issues discussed, not only on PI scientific conferences but also on parliamentary fora and meetings.

The issue of Parliamentary Information Visualization (PIV) is an interesting topic; not only because visualizations are, in most cases, inviting and impressive to the human eye and brain. The main reason is that visual representations reveal different aspects of an issue in a systematic way, ranging from simple parliamentary information (such as voting records) to profound socio-political issues that lie behind shapes and colors. This article aims to explore some of the aspects related to the visualization of parliamentary information and activity.

Untangling the mystery behind visualized parliamentary information
Recent research on 19 PIV initiatives, presented in CeDEM 2014, has proven that visualizing parliamentary information is a complicated task. Its success depends on several factors: the availability of data and information, the choice of the visualization method, the intention behind the visualizations, and their effectiveness when these technologies are tied to a citizen engagement project.

To begin with, what has impressed us most during our research is the kind of information that was visualized. Characteristics, personal data and performance of Members of Parliament (MPs)/Members of European Parliament (MEPs), as well as political groups and member-states, are the elements most commonly visualized. On the other hand, particular legislative proposals, actions of MPs/MEPs through parliamentary control procedures and texts of legislation are less often visualized, which is, to some extent, understandable due to the complexity of visually depicting long legislative documents and the changes that accompany them.

Gregor Aisch – The Making of a Law visualization

However, visually representing a legislative text and its amendments might possibly reveal important aspects of a bill, such as time of submission, specific modifications that have been performed, and additions or deleted articles and paragraphs in the text.

Another interesting aspect is the visualization method used. There is a variety of methods deployed even for the visualization of the same category of Parliamentary Informatics. Robert Kosara notes characteristically: “The seemingly simple choice between a bar and a line chart has implications on how we perceive the data”.

In the same line of thought, in a recent design camp of the Law Factory project, two designer groups independently combined data for law-making processes with an array of visualization methods, in order to bring forward different points of view of the same phenomenon. Indeed, one-method-fits-all approaches cannot be applied when it comes to parliamentary information visualization. A phenomenon can be visualized both quantitatively and qualitatively, and each method can bring different results. Therefore, visualizations can facilitate plain information or further explorations, depending on the aspirations of the designer. Enabling user information and exploration are, to some extent, the primary challenges set by PIV designers. However, not all visualization methods permit the same degree of exploration. Or sometimes, the ability of in-depth exploration is facilitated by providing further background information in order to help end users navigate, comprehend and interpret the visualization.

Beyond information and exploration
Surely, a visualization of MPs’ votes, characteristics, particular legislative proposals or texts of legislation can better inform citizens. But is it enough to make them empowered? The key to this question is interaction. Interaction whether in the sense of human-computer interaction or human-to-human interaction in a physical or digital context, always refers to a two-way procedure and effect. Schrage notes succinctly: “Don’t view visualization as a medium that substitutes pictures for words but as interfaces to human interactions that create new opportunities for new value creation.”

When it comes to knowledge gained through this exploration, it is understandable that knowledge is useless if it is not shared. This is a crucial challenge faced by visualization designers, because the creation of platforms that host visualizations and enable further exchange of views and dialogue between users can facilitate citizen engagement. Additionally, information sharing or information provision through an array of contemporary and traditional means (open data, social media, printing, e-mail etc.) can render PIV initiatives more complete and inclusive.

An issue of information representation, or information trustworthiness?
Beyond the technological and functional aspects of parliamentary information visualization, it is interesting to have a look into information management and the relationship between parliaments and Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations (PMOs). As also presented by a relevant survey, PMOs serve as a hub for presenting or monitoring the work of elected representatives, and seem to cover a wide range of activities concerning parliamentary development. This, however, might not always be easily acceptable by parliaments or MPs, since it may give to elected representatives a feeling of being surveilled by these organizations.

To further explain this, questions such as who owns vs. who holds parliamentary information, where and when is this information published, and to what ends, raise deeper issues of information originality, liability of information sources and trustworthiness of both the information and its owners. For parliaments and politicians, in particular, parliamentary information monitoring and visualization initiatives may be seen as a way to surveil their work and performance, whereas for PMOs themselves these initiatives can be seen as tools for pushing towards transparency of parliamentary work and accountability of elected representatives. This discussion is quite multi-faceted, and goes beyond the scope of this post. What should be kept in mind, however, is that establishing collaboration between politicians/parliaments and civil society surely requires time, effort, trust and common understanding from all the parties involved. Under these conditions, PIV and PMO initiatives can serve as hubs that bring parliaments and citizens closer, with a view to forming a more trusted relationship.

Towards transparency?

Most PIV initiatives provide information in a way compliant with the principles of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. Openness is a necessary condition for transparency. But, then, what is transparency? Is it possible to come up with a definition that accommodates the whole essence of this concept?

Transparent labyrinth by Robert Morris, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (Dezeen)

In this quest, it is important to consider that neither openness nor transparency can exist without access to information (ATI). Consequently, availability and accessibility of parliamentary information are fundamental prerequisites in order to apply any technology that will hopefully contribute to inform, empower and help citizens participate in public decision-making.
Apart from that, it is important to look back in the definition, essence and legal nature of Freedom of Information (FOI) and Right to Information (RTI) provisions, as these are stated in the constitution of each country. A closer consideration of the similarities and differences between the terms “Freedom” and “Right”, whose meanings we usually take for granted, can provide important insight for the dependencies between them. Clarifying the meaning and function of these terms in a socio-political system can be a helpful start towards unraveling the notion of transparency.

Still, one thing is for sure: being informed and educated on our rights as citizens, as well as on how to exercise them, is a necessity nowadays. Educated citizens are able not only to comprehend the information available, but also search further, participate and have their say in decision-making. The example of the Right to Know initiative in Australia, based on the Alaveteli open-source platform, is an example of such an effort. The PIV initiatives researched thus far have shown that citizen engagement is a hard-to-reach task, which requires constant commitment and strive through a variety of tools and actions. In the long run, the full potential and effectiveness of these constantly evolving initiatives remains to be seen. In this context, legislative transparency remains in itself an open issue with many interesting aspects yet to be explored.

The links provided in the post are indicative examples and do not intend to promote initiatives or written materials for commercial or advertising purposes.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Aspasia Papaloi is a civil servant in the IT and New Technologies Directorate of the Hellenic Parliament, a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Athens and a research fellow of the Laboratory of New Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media, contributing as a Teaching Assistant. She holds an MA with specialization in ICT Management from the University of the Aegean in Rhodes and a Bachelor of Arts in German Language and Literature (Germanistik) from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research area involves e-Parliaments with a special focus on visualization for the achievement of transparency.

gouscos Dimitris Gouscos is Assistant Professor with the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Athens and a research fellow of the Laboratory of New Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media, where he contributes to co-ordination of two research groups on Digital Media for Learning and Digital Media for Participation. His research interests evolve around applications of digital communication in open governance, participatory media, interactive storytelling and playful learning. More information available on http://www.media.uoa.gr/~gouscos.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

Is it good enough for the law to be written for lawyers?

Access to justice, Citizen participation in lawmaking, Collaboration in legal informatics, Crowdsourcing and free access to law, Crowdsourcing and legal information systems, Disruptive legal technology, Interdisciplinary collaboration in legal informatics, Legal publishing, Legal text mining, Legal text processing, Linked Data and law Comments Off

Sep 182014

c.c. BY-SA 3.0. wikipedia.org

If you think that law isn’t written for lawyers, try reading some. It can even start looking normal after a while (say about the length of time it takes to get through law degree). But research on the main street impact of legal language suggests that for most people, the law is likely to be either incomprehensible or very hard to read.

This problem is a focus of a research project which a team of us at ANU and Cornell LII have been addressing over the past months (Eric McCreath (Australian National University, Research School of Computer Science), Wayne Weibel (Cornell University Law School, Legal Information Insitute), Nic Ceynowa (LII), Sara Frug (LII), Tom Bruce (LII) and myself (ANU)). With the generous help of thousands of LII users, as part of a citizen science project, we’ve been collecting data on the readability of law as well as demographic data about the users of law.

If you are concerned about access to law, and many are, the current situation is not really good enough. Whether you tend to ‘human rights’, ‘democratic values’, ‘economic efficiency’, ‘rule of law’ or are just wanting to make sure your hapless minions follow your every command, you’ll be able to think of a good reason why the law should be more accessible (readable) than it is.

Of course the problem has been around for a very long time, and plain language is a standing goal of many legislative drafting offices. Reform efforts have been underway since the middle ages. Certainly legal language has improved considerably, particularly as a result of 19th and 20th century reforms with that goal in mind. Still, the law can’t be said to be readily accessible to the general public, in the sense of its readability.

What has changed that makes the problem more urgent today is that the general public can now at least get to the law. That’s the revolution that’s been achieved by online publishers of the law, including the Free Access to Law Movement and official and commercial law publishers. As the UK’s First Parliamentary Counsel observed last year:

Legislation affects us all. And increasingly, legislation is being searched for, read and used by a broad range of people. It is no longer confined to professional libraries; websites like legislation.gov.uk have made it accessible to everyone. So the digital age has made it easier for people to find the law of the land; but once they have found it, they may be baffled. The law is regarded by its users as intricate and intimidating.

In 2010, the Plain Writing Act was adopted by the US Congress with the aim of improving government writing. Sad to say, the Act itself is no model of plain language. Section, sub-section and paragraph roll on, line after line, provision after convoluted provision. In substance they say not much more than: write clearly so that the public can understand and use what you write. Didn’t anyone see the irony? Then again, reality check, most legislation is never read by the people who vote to make it law. Just to make sure the drawbridge was well and truly up, if you read through to the fine print at the end there is an important rider. What happens if no one can understand what the law is supposed to mean? Well, nothing a judge can do about it. Great aspiration, but …

A sea change could be on the way, though. The Good Law initiative is one great example of efforts to address the complexity and readability of legislation. What is significant is that how we are thinking about legal rules is changing. Official publishers of the law are beginning to talk about the law as if it’s data. The UK National Archives Office has even published an API — Application Programmers Interface (basically a ‘how to’ for developers who want to use the “data”).So now we’re thinking of law as data. And we’re going to unleash computer scientists on it, to do whatever their imaginations can come up with. Bommarito and Katz‘ work on the legal code as a mathematical network is a great example of the virtually infinite possibilities.

Our own research uses the potential of computational technologies in another way. Online legal sites are not just ‘documents’. They are places where people are actively interacting with the law. We used crowd-sourcing to engage with this audience, asking them to rate law on readability characteristics as well as exploring the demographics of who uses the law. Our aim was to develop a labelled dataset that could be used as input to machine learning. “Labelled data” is machine learning gold — hard to get, but if you can you get it, you can use it to make predictions about what human judges would say. In our case we are trying to predict whether a legal sentence will be readable or not.

In the process we learned quite a bit about the audience using the law, and about which law they use. Scouring the Google Analytics data, it became obvious that the law is not equally read. We may all be equal before the law, but the law is not equal before us. Just 37 sections of the US Code account for almost 10% of the page visits to US code pages (there are about 65,000). So a tiny fraction of the Code is being read all the time. On the other hand there are huge swathes of the Code that hardly ever see the light of a back illuminated screen. This is not trivial news. Computer scientists love lists. Prioritised lists get their own special lectures for first year CS students — and here we have a prioritized list. You want to know what law is at the top of your priority list — the users will tell you. If you’re concerned with cleaning up the law code or making it easier to understand, there’s useful stuff here.

Ranking of sections by frequency of readership (on a logarithmic scale)

It will be no surprise that we found that law is harder for just about every part of the community than legal professionals. What was surprising was that legal professionals (including law students), turn out to be a minority of those interested enough to respond, on the LII site at least.

These were just a few of the demographic insights we were able to draw.

On the machine learning front, we were able to show that machine learning can improve on traditional readability metrics in predicting language difficulty (they’ve long been regarded as suspect in application to legal texts anyway). That said, it’s early days and we would like to extend the research we have done so far. There is a lot of potential for future research applying computational techniques to the readability of law. A co-authored publication further describing the research introduced in this article will be presented at this year’s Law Via the Internet Conference being held at the end of September.

But while we’re thinking about it, there are other ways to think about `access’ to law. What if instead of writing the law, it was visualized? You know — like in pictures. Before you storm off in contempt, note this: research is validating that pictures can improve user experience — for example in the contract space, where what your clients think of your contract can impact on your bottom line.

It’s radical enough unleashing computer scientists on legal rules. What might the law look like if we try thinking like designers? ‘User experience’ of legal rules? That one didn’t come up in law school. We’re in some surreally different world at this point. Designers create artefacts for people to use which are optimised for functionality, beauty and other characteristics –- not things that are meant to tell people what to do. ‘User experience’ is their kind of thinking.

As readers of Vox Pop will know, the idea of legal design is starting to get traction. Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera’s great article on legal design covers some of the field. An article they jointly published last year points out some of the benefits of visualization. Earlier this year, we worked on a joint paper exploring the feasibility of automating legal visualization. We were able to demonstrate the automation of visualization of clauses, such as a contract term clause, a liquidated damages clause or a payment clause. Visit our proof of concept site, where you can play with visualizing different options.

OK. So perhaps some of the above reads like we’re on the up-slope of the hype curve. But that of course is the fun. For those of us who’ve spent many years in the law, looking at the law from a different professional paradigm can help us see things that didn’t stand out before. It certainly enjoyable and brings a breath of fresh air to the law.

Michael Curtotti is undertaking a PhD in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University. His co-authored publications on legal informatics include: A Right to Access Implies a Right to Know: An Open Online Platform for Readability Research; Enhancing the Visualization of Law and A corpus of Australian contract language: description, profiling and analysis. He holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of New South Wales, and a Masters of International Law from the Australian National University. He works part-time as a legal adviser to the ANU Students Association and the ANU Post-graduate & research students Association, providing free legal services to ANU students.

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VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

Designing Legal Communications that Resonate

visualization 3 Responses »

Sep 052014

By Margaret Hagan, Alex Gavis and Kursat Ozenc

Margaret Hagan, Kursat Ozenc, and Alex Gavis kick off the class Get Smart on legal communication design. (c) Fred Leichter, 2014.

1. Bringing communication design to law

In May 2014, we ran a Legal Communication Design class at Stanford’s Institute of Design, or the d.school. Though legal communications have a reputation as dense, opaque & heavy, we wanted to open up some space for experimenting with what legal communication could be. The d.school proposes that professionals solve problems through collaborative, interdisciplinary experimentation, all while focused on building solutions that are user-friendly & engaging for specific end-users.

We decided to take this approach and apply it to legal communications. Our goals were twofold:

to train students in how to communicate complex information to lay audiences, and
to scope new patterns and models for more resonant communication design of information that conveys legal terms & conditions, rights and warnings.

We formed a three-person teaching team: Margaret Hagan, a legal designer based at Stanford’s d.school; Alex Gavis, in-house counsel at Fidelity Investments with expertise in consumer and financial regulations and product design; and Kursat Ozenc, an interaction designer trained at Carnegie Mellon’s Design School and working at Autodesk.

We developed a two-day intensive “Pop Up” class at the d.school entitled, “Get Smart: Marking Complicated Information Simple.” We intended for the class to be mostly populated by law students, but most of our applicants came from students studying in other fields: engineering, management science, business, political science, and anthropology. The class was oversubscribed, and ultimately limited to about 45 students.

2. Our approach to complex communication design

The pop-up class was an experiment to see what ideas would emerge from interdisciplinary groups of students using design to make complex legal information more comprehensible. As we prepared for the class, we began to form a Framework of Complex Communication Design. Our central insight is that complex information design can be categorized into two basic branches: (1) that for analysis and understanding, and (2) that for decision-making and action.

Communication Design for Insight and Understanding

The first categorization can be described as making complex sets of information more understandable. There is considerable buzz around this type of complex communication design right now, especially around “data visualizations”. This type of design draws on data sets underlying complex sets of facts, and it attempts to present the data sets in a lively and engaging matter.

In this branch of complex communication design, the goal is to educate. It is to shape data that is otherwise overwhelming into information that is digestible and attractive, and it helps the user understand the data and information. Ideally, the design will allow its author to convey large data sets for better comprehension by individuals — helping them to see patterns, trends, and meaning in an otherwise opaque set of information. The design might also be interactive and flexible enough to allow its end-user to find new insights and inspirations about the data topic, which the design’s author was not aware of.

This type of communication design is commonly employed by scientists, journalists, and others who want to help people make connections between large data sets and the broader world.

Communication Design for Decision-Making

The second stream of communication design is about making complex rules and systems both comprehensible and actionable. It applies to legal communications of notices, rights and warnings. Done well, this type of complex design has the author presenting the rules of a system in their complexity, but empowers the end-user to navigate this complexity — giving them an understanding of the rules and the ability to apply them to the user’s specific situation and decisions.

The goal here is not so much about analysis, like in the first branch, but rather in as helping people make better decisions for themselves. It is about helping people understand the situation that they are in, what rules apply to them, what the consequences of these rules will be, and what kind of behavior to take in response to these rules.

This type of communication design is a legal design challenge. It is focuses on helping people understand the rules of the world and applying the rules to their own life. It is not education for education’s sake. It is practical, but also quite challenging.

In practice, though legal communication design should apply directly to people’s lives, it does not. The standard for this branch of design is currently low, if we look at the way terms and conditions are presented in consumer contracts, or the legal fine print at the bottom of television advertisements, or the privacy policies on websites. Most often the communications as presented are dense, jargon-laden, and pedantic. They do not provide the user with greater comprehension of the rules, nor do they empower better decision-making.

Our Focus

Accordingly, our goal for the class was to focus on this second category of communication design. We intended to apply user-centered, experimental design process to explore what types of communication could lead to more user engagement, comprehension, and better decision-making.

3. The Class

The d.school class was held over two days: the first day was an evening boot-camp in visual and communication design, followed by a second day “design sprint” to create and test complex legal communication designs in response to specific use-cases we created.

We created the boot-camp to be a staged training. We first taught the basics of good information design. Then, we scaled this knowledge to review complex information design techniques. After this two-staged boot-camp, the next day was an eight-hour session, during which students were challenged to apply what they learned in the first day to legal use-cases.

The Design Bootcamp

Our challenge in the bootcamp was to to cover the basics of quality communication design to a student audience relatively un-versed in design, within a very restricted time. We decided to do a mixture of learning-by-doing and learning-by-exposure. We also created and distributed “cheat-sheets” covering the basic principles of communication design, blended with tips, templates, and suggestions.

We introduced the fundamental Gestalt principles of visual design (i.e., hierarchy, proximity, asymmetry), and then we showed examples of effective and ineffective design.

Kursat Ozenc explains visual design principles through examples. (c) Fred Leichter 2014.

Prior to the class, we had asked students to post examples of complex communication design to our class website. We drew on these student-sourced images for in-class discussion, and our teaching team also scouted images that could demonstrate the fundamental principles. The examples of visual design ranged from those intended to educate, to those meant to delight or intrigue. We mixed in very practical graphics with those with innovative visual cues and illustrations.

Immersing students in many forms of communication design helped to demonstrate design principles in a way that verbal descriptions could not. The examples also provided good inspiration material for the teams to use, when trying to decide how to convey a message, or to synthesize data points into meaningful relationships. Our teaching strategy was to provide the students with a broad portfolio of types of design, so they could see for themselves why certain designs work or do not, and that they could borrow from the designs that engaged them as a user.

We next took the class through a series of short, 20-minute design exercises, to help them build their design muscles for use the next day. First, we asked students to design a flyer invitation to their next birthday – keeping them focused on how to make a convincing communication within space constraints. This was to practice their understanding of basic principles of good composition, messaging, color choice, and imagery.

Next, we ran a more legal design exercise, in which the students had to represent the complex text instructions for using a transit card in a usable way. The goal was to make these terms and conditions into a user-friendly, contextual communication that a user could actually use during their commute to avoid fines.

A quick design to convey a Transit Card’s rules to a commuter.

With each of these exercises, students worked by themselves for a short period, and then presented their work to the group. The design reviews provided some critical feedback, as well as encouragement for good design work. These short exercises were warm-ups and team building for the next day’s design sprint.

The Legal Communication Problem and Use Cases

On the second day, the class shifted focus from good communication design practices to the challenges of legal design. Alex began the day with a discussion of why good legal communications design matters. While the law does not require that contracting parties read an agreement, there must be a meeting of the minds. Reasonable processes for obtaining consumer acknowledgement or consent in online agreements are upheld by courts. It takes a lot of bad facts to unwind a contract as unenforceable.

Alex Gavis presents the challenges lawyers face when trying to design legal communications to customers. (c) Fred Leichter 2014.

Some laws are proscriptive to protect the public (e.g., the securities laws on full and fair disclosure) others are principles based (e.g., consumer protection laws prohibiting unfair and deceptive acts), and some are structured to validate legitimacy of actions (e.g., the federal and state electronic signature laws).

All this leads to legal dissonance on how consumers may be treated when in transacting online for goods or obtaining services. They generally make purchase decisions not based on any awareness of terms or conditions or the “fine print.” They are confronted with contracts, terms-of-use, consents, and disclosures all over the place, but they typically do not take action on them (click, acknowledge, accept) until after making a decision — usually only upon checkout.

The requirements to make these legitimate in the law can vary by law, regulation, and jurisdiction. Many transactions or interactions wind up in the category of “agree now, worry later” for consumers.

Communications in which the message is well-crafted and the visual is well-rendered can help understanding and mitigate later problems. If there is understanding at the beginning of the consumer-commercial relationship, then there may be less at risk for both parties. Good design and communications may lead to better outcomes as both parties understand what is being asked and required of them and later disputes may be mitigated or dampened.

We assembled four use cases to demonstrate the importance of good communications design.

Use Case 1: “And Where Do I Sign?”

The first use case mentions a fictitious consumer, Susan, who spends a lot of time researching and connecting with friends about where to put her money. She makes a decision and is eager to open an account quickly at the financial institution she has chosen.

This is where the road gets bumpy for her as she must suddenly navigate disclosures, notices, consents, agreements and the providing of personal information. This mishmash of activity occurs before she can successfully open an account, and she thinks that somewhere in all that language is something that she may wish she had known and understood.

Students were assigned to consider these facts and determine how to design a different experience that would engage and inform (and perhaps delight) Susan.

Use Case #2: “I am on the Run, Just Tell Me What to Do.”

The second use case involved a similar fact scenario to the first one, but asked students to imagine that Susan is a busy executive who travels all over the U.S. She has a small window of time in which to open an account one day and must do so at the airport between flights.

The students’ assignment was to design a successful (and delightful) experience for Susan that can work with her mobility.

Use Case #3: “When Can I Play?”

The third use case involved a father–son interaction. Carlos wants to help his young son download an online game. The gaming company has agreements, notices, and terms and conditions that it needs Carlos to agree to before it will allow for the downloading of the game. Some of the conditions are required by law; some are required by the company to protect its intellectual property; and some may be required by the credit card company that is handling the billing.

The students’ assignment was to consider how Carlos, in the process of obtaining information and accepting a free trial, can understand the various rights and responsibilities that he (and his son) will be taking on, including license and intellectual property rights, the conditions and responsibilities for payments and the policies and regulations regarding his and his son’s privacy preferences. They were to design an experience that would allow Carlos to understand better what is involved, and from the standpoint of Carlos completing it online through a mobile device with limited print and storage capabilities.

Use Case #4: “You Want Me to Say What?”

The final use case involved an example of advertising for financial services. Advertising provides a source of information to prospective customers about the products and services offered by financial services firms. Advertisers desire to keep the messaging in advertisements streamlined and straightforward, while at the same time making compelling messaging that will be understood by consumers and complying with regulatory standards.

The students were tasked with conjuring advertising across print, web, mobile and television that can meet the twin goals of being innovative in messaging while adhering to specific regulatory disclosure requirements. The students were provided with examples of the disclosure requirements and were asked to find ways to innovate with the display and positioning of required disclosures. They were challenged to discover new concepts in advertising design to meet the goals of understandability, simplicity and investor understanding.

The Design Sprint

We formed the students into teams, mixing their disciplines to get a balance of law students, engineers, social scientists, and humanities students in each group. Then each group was able to choose which use case they wanted to work on.

With their use case chosen, the teams first worked to flesh out a persona in each case, around which to design and build their models. Next, the teams evaluated the type of information that the use-case required to be presented to the persona-audience. After that, they brainstormed design ideas, about what kinds of communications may engage their persona.

Once they developed ideas, the teams discussed their practicality and, in some cases, the groups voted on which one (or ones) to pursue. With this focus, they then spent an hour designing a prototype of the communication design to test in the field. Some created visuals by hand, others used digital tools to mock-up storyboards, app interfaces, or graphics.

After lunch, they went out onto the Stanford campus to find user testers. They asked members of the public for feedback on their ideas and design. Finally, in the last hour of the workshop, each team presented their final designs and user feedback to the class.

4. Models that Emerged

We found that the students generated ideas that suggest several different models for how to provide notice in a legal situation.

Model 1: Embedded Notice

This model involves embedding information concerning warnings into the context of the content that the user desires to consume.

For a television advertisement, for example, one team proposed that, instead of presenting images and voice together and then the legal disclosures (in “fine print” text) in a separate overlay, the message(s) from the legal disclosures could be woven into the images and the voiceover. This would allow a customer to comprehend the “fine print” information within the visual and aural content experience, without having to strain to read the disclosure text on screen.

For Use Case #3, one team suggested that the privacy disclosures and other legal warnings be incorporated into the game environment. The same avatars, background, points system and interfaces would exist for the game and for the disclosures. They suggested an approach where a game user goes through the disclosures and wins points, advancing in the game universe.

This allows the user to become educated on privacy and legal issues in the context of what he or she wants to do – play the game. It cleverly embeds the disclosures and warnings directly into the game flow.

The overall model has the legal and financial notice woven together with the juicy and non-legal content.

1a: Interactive Games

One popular type of an embedded notice was game-based. Several teams built models around games, putting the information into a highly interactive and rewarding type of situation.

As discussed with the class, a drawback with this model is that it is very intensive, requiring an investment of time from the user as well as from the notice giver. A benefit is that it has a narrative that can be quite engaging. It has stages and incentives to keep exploring the information being communicated.

This model might work very well when the user is already within a digital environment, like a game on a computer or on an app. The notice-game can be woven seamlessly into the experience that the user is trying to enjoy. It should be considered for “entertainment experiences,” when the user is already in an entertainment mode — for example, when he or she is about to play a game, watch a movie, read a magazine, or start a video game.

Model 2: Roadmap with Zoom

This model involves a large map of the notice and message, which the user can then zoom in and out of. The user chooses where to focus, and can see both the complexity all at once from a distance, or zoomed into a particular part of it.

This type of design allows the user to engage with the material selectively and in a staged way. The omniscient user sets the terms.

Two different teams presented designs along this model, but with slight variations. In one model, the designer of the communication sets a sequential path through the communication, and the user goes step by step through it.

The second model is non-sequential and non-linear. The user browses through the communication, zooming in and out of particular topics and choices. The design tracks the progress they have made, but it does not strictly guide the user along a certain path.

Model 3: Divide & Conquer

The divide and conquer model is a modular series of communications that add up to a complete, complex delivery of notice. It involves a modular, staged set of discrete “communication tasks,” that the user proceeds through at their own pace.

The user receives a short communication and then must respond in some way to show that she has registered the information. Each communication is a task, with a two-way channel, of the designer presenting information to the user and the user having to respond in some way. The user goes through the communication tasks one by one, completing the stages and eventually getting the entire communication.

This model takes inspiration from a checklist, but it gives a focused experience for each task. It also lets the user do things in a short way, knowing how much time each of these modules should take and then conquering what they want depending on their situation at the time.

3a: The efficient, clean click-through

One example of this model was more for a professional user, who values efficiency and practicality. The design’s goal was to provide an interactive app that would efficiently let the professional target and flag important information. It was an even more streamlined version of Divide & Conquer, for people who don’t want to dive into any details.

This model allowed for having the details sent later through email or reminders, for when the user may want to refer to the full text. It generally prioritized quick understanding over deep comprehension, but tried to give enough understanding to alert a user to anything she may be concerned about or may want to explore at a later time.

Model 4: Personalized, Conversational, Growing Agreement

In this design, the user responds to prompts, asking him for his information and preferences. As he responds to each prompt, a customized communication is generated for him. It is presented alongside his responses, so he can see how the contract, notice, or other type of legal communication will change depending on his answers.

The legal notice is not a given, but rather is progressively generated by the user. The motive behind this model is to give the user a sense of authorship and control. The user is able to see how his choices affect the length and complexity of provisions of the agreement that he must accept at the end of the process. There is a dynamic nature to this process as paragraphs build or collapse depending upon actions. It is also to show flexibility from the designer and legal communicator — to let them show they are willing to defer to the preferences of the user. The experience becomes one that is constructive.

Model 5: Proximate, Contextual Notification

In the proximate notice design, the legal communication is divided up into stages and then presented to the user as it relates to the topic at hand.

It was designed with the idea of presenting terms and conditions selectively, as it relates to the user’s specific data disclosures. As the user enters data into a field, the design immediately prompts her with what the rules, restrictions and notices are for that piece of information. The user sees the conditions as applied to each data point individually.

The design intends to make the large, complex set of terms and conditions more understandable by contextualizing them, and by presenting them bit by bit. The model ideally helps the user understand concretely how each piece of information she discloses relates to the terms and conditions.

Model 6: Protector Relationship

In the protector model, the design attempts to put the user in the mindset of protecting another person, or a future version of themselves. It may do this through the use of an avatar, who will be affected by the content of the communication. Or it could be through a design that shows the user a future version of herself, and encouraging her to think of the communication as applied to this future version.

The goal is to encourage more engagement with a legal communication by putting the user in the position of protecting someone else. Rather than passing over legal information, the user will invest attention into it because something is at stake for someone else. It taps into a sense of duty to protect, especially for someone who seems vulnerable.

This model of design attempts to facilitate more thoughtfulness about the legal communication — helping the user think about how it will play out over a long term. It may also encourage users to think of cause and effect.

5. Ways Forward

The ideas that emerged were bounded by the limited one-day timing for the class. With more time, we are confident that additional ideas would be born. It was helpful to have a mixture of law, business, engineering, and students in other disciplines participating in the class, as they brought varied ideas to the table.

Now we are planning a follow-up workshop with a more specific group of participants: lawyers who work on legal communication challenges like those in our use cases, and designers who have an interest in engaging, resonant communications. Our plan is to take the models and prototypes that emerged out of the class, and to work with the lawyers and designers to validate or upend these initial drafts. We hope to hone a more definite set of good legal communication design patterns, which can be useful to those making complex information design.

After this next-stage workshop, we are considering a controlled test of several of the most promising concepts to determine whether they have the desired effect of making contracting more understandable and simpler. We could imagine these ideas being tested in any number of different contexts where a business would like its users to agree to specific conditions or agreements. This also could be the subject of psychology research and studies on the propensity for individuals to understand information that is designed for their consumption.

The class confirmed for us that there are design approaches — some of which our class developed and others yet to be found — that can directly address complexity in legal interactions and that may well resonate.

About the Authors

Alex Gavis is a member of the Corporate Legal Department of FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments, one of the largest brokerage and mutual fund companies in the United States and the leading provider of workplace retirement savings plans. He manages a team of attorneys and professionals and is responsible for providing legal services to the firm’s retail brokerage, college savings, stock plan and workplace retirement businesses. He also oversees and manages legal services for Fidelity’s businesses involved in electronic and mobile commerce, start-up innovation, and social media. Mr. Gavis also oversees legal advice on all of Fidelity’s national advertising and marketing initiatives. He is frequent speaker and lecturer on securities law and e-commerce issues.

Margaret Hagan is a fellow at Stanford Law’s Center on the Legal Profession and a lecturer at Stanford Institute of Design (the d.school). She was a fellow at the d.school from 2013-2014, where she launched the Program for Legal Tech & Design, experimenting in how design can make legal services more usable, useful and engaging. She taught a series of project-based classes, with interdisciplinary student groups tackling legal challenges through user-focused research and design of new legal products and services. She also leads workshops to train legal professionals in the design process, to produce client-focused innovation. Her blog on legal design is Open Law Lab, and her portfolio of design projects and illustrations are available here.

Kursat Ozenc is a Senior User Experience Designer at Autodesk in San Francisco, building the next generation design tools for infrastructure professionals. He conducts user research, turns research insights into concept designs, & transforms designs into launch-ready systems, interactions, and interfaces. He completed his Ph.D. studies (2011) in design at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds an M.F.A. degree (2004) in Visual Communication Design from Sabanci University in Istanbul, and a bachelors degree (2002) in Industrial Product design from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkiye.
Other posts on visualization and law on this blog include Visual Law: What Lawyers Need to Learn from Information Designers by Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

openlaws

Access to justice, Adding legal commentary to free access to law services, Annotation of legal texts, Crowdsourcing and free access to law, Crowdsourcing and legal information systems, Demand for free access to law, Disruptive legal technology, European Union, free access to law, Legal publishing, Legal social media, Legal social networks, Open Government Data, Web 2.0 and law No Responses »

Jun 162014

The other day a friend came to me because he heard about the openlaws.eu project. He said: “Hey, openlaws sounds great – does that mean that I can write my own laws now?”. I had to tell him no, but that it was almost as good as that… Continue reading »

Rough Consensus, Running Standards: The Restatement Project

Annotation of legal texts, Electronic legal publishing, Legal argument, Legal informatics, legal language, Legal text processing, Legal XML 2 Responses »

Jun 032014

1. The Death and Life of Great Legal Data Standards

Thanks to the many efforts of the open government movement in the past decade, the benefits of machine-readable legal data — legal data which can be processed and easily interpreted by computers — are now widely understood. In the world of government statutes and reports, machine-readability would significantly enhance public transparency, help to increase efficiencies in providing services to the public, and make it possible for innovators to develop third-party services that enhance civic life.

In the universe of private legal data — that of contracts, briefs, and memos — machine-readability would open up vast potential efficiencies within the law firm context, allow the development of novel approaches to processing the law, and would help to drive down the costs of providing legal services.

However, while the benefits are understood, by and large the vision of rendering the vast majority of legal documents into a machine-readable standard has not been realized. While projects do exist to acquire and release statutory language in a machine-readable format (and the government has backed similar initiatives), the vast body of contractual language and other private legal documents remains trapped in a closed universe of hard copies, PDFs, unstructured plaintext and Microsoft Word files.

Though this is a relatively technical point, it has broad policy implications for society at large. Perhaps the biggest upshot is that machine-readability promises to vastly improve access to the legal system, not only for those seeking legal services, but also for those seeking to provide legal services, as well.

It is not for lack of a standard specification that the status quo exists. Indeed, projects like LegalXML have developed specifications that describe a machine-readable markup for a vast range of different types of legal documents. As of writing, the project includes technical committees working on legislative documents, contracts, court filings, citations, and more.

However, by and large these efforts to develop machine-readable specifications for legal data have only solved part of the problem. Creating the standard is one thing, but actually driving adoption of a legal data standard is another (often more difficult) matter. There are a number of reasons why existing standards have failed to gain traction among the creators of legal data.

For one, the oft-cited aversion of lawyers to technology remains a relevant factor. Particularly in the case of the standardization of legal data, where the projected benefits exist in the future and the magnitude of benefit speculative at the present moment, persuading lawyers and legislatures to adopt a new standard remains a challenge, at best.

Secondly, the financial incentives of some actors may actually be opposed towards rendering the universe of legal documents into a machine-readable standard. A universe of largely machine-readable legal documents would also be one in which it may be possible for third-parties to develop systems that automate and significantly streamline legal services. In the context of the ever-present billable hour, parties may resist the introduction of technological shifts that enable these efficiencies to emerge.

Third, the costs of converting existing legal data into a machine-readable standard may also pose a significant barrier to adoption. Marking up unstructured legal text can be highly costly depending on the intended machine usage of the document and the type of document in question. Persuading a legislature, firm, or other organization with a large existing repository of legal documents to take on large one-time costs to render the documents into a common standard also discourages adoption.

These three reinforcing forces erect a significant cultural and economic barrier against the integration of machine-readable standards into the production of legal text. To the extent that one believes in the benefits from standardization for the legal industry and society at large, the issue is — in fact — not how to define a standard, but how to establish one.

2. Rough Consensus, Running Standards

So, how might one go about promulgating a standard? Particularly in a world in which lawyers, the very actors that produce the bulk of legal data, are resistant to change, mere attempts to mobilize the legal community to action are destined to fail in bringing about the fundamental shift necessary to render most if not all legal documents in a common machine-readable format.

In such a context, implementing a standard in a way that removes humans from the loop entirely may, in fact, be more effective. To do so, one might design code that was capable of automatically rendering legal text into a machine-readable format. This code could then be implemented by applications of all kinds, which would output legal documents in a standard format by default. This would include the word processors used by lawyers, but also integration with platforms like LegalZoom or RocketLawyer that routinely generate large quantities of legal data. Such a solution would eliminate the need for lawyer involvement from the process of implementing a standard entirely: any text created would be automatically parsed and outputted in a machine readable format. Scripts might also be written to identify legal documents online and process them into a common format. As the body of documents rendered in a given format grew, it would be possible for others to write software leveraging the increased penetration of the standard.

There are — obviously — technical limitations in realizing this vision of a generalized legal data parser. For one, designing a truly comprehensive parser is a massively difficult computer science challenge. Legal documents come in a vast diversity of flavors, and no common textual conventions allow for the perfect accurate parsing of the semantic content of any given legal text. Quite simply, any parser will be an imperfect (perhaps highly imperfect) approximation of full machine-readability.

Despite the lack of a perfect solution, an open question exists as to whether or not an extremely rough parsing system, implemented at sufficient scale, would be enough to kickstart the creation of a true common standard for legal text. A popular solution, however imperfect, would encourage others to implement nuances to the code. It would also encourage the design of applications for documents rendered in the standard. Beginning from the roughest of parsers, a functional standard might become the platform for a much bigger change in the nature of legal documents. The key is to achieve the “minimal viable standard” that will begin the snowball rolling down the hill: the point at which the parser is rendering sufficient legal documents in a common format that additional value can be created by improving the parser and applying it to an ever broader scope of legal data.

But, what is the critical mass of documents one might need? How effective would the parser need to be in order to achieve the initial wave of adoption? Discovering this, and learning whether or not such a strategy would be effective, is at the heart of the Restatement project.

3. Introducing Project Restatement

Supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund, Restatement is a simple, rough-and-ready system which automatically parses legal text into a basic machine-readable JSON format. It has also been released under the permissive terms of the MIT License, to encourage active experimentation and implementation.

The concept is to develop an easily-extensible system which parses through legal text and looks for some common features to render into a standard format. Our general design principle in developing the parser was to begin with only the most simple features common to nearly all legal documents. This includes the parsing of headers, section information, and “blanks” for inputs in legal documents like contracts. As a demonstration of the potential application of Restatement, we’re also designing a viewer that takes documents rendered in the Restatement format and displays them in a simple, beautiful, web-readable version.

Underneath the hood, Restatement is all built upon web technology. This was a deliberate choice, as Restatement aims to provide a usable alternative to document formats like PDF and Microsoft Word. We want to make it easy for developers to write software that displays and modifies legal documents in the browser.

In particular, Restatement is built entirely in JavaScript. The past few years have been exciting for the JavaScript community. We’ve seen an incredible flourishing of not only new projects built on JavaScript, but also new tools for building cool new things with JavaScript. It seemed clear to us that it’s the platform to build on right now, so we wrote the Restatement parser and viewer in JavaScript, and made the Restatement format itself a type of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) document.

For those who are more technically inclined, we also knew that Restatement needed a parser formalism, that is, a precise way to define how plain text can get transformed into Restatement format. We became interested in recent advance in parsing technology, called PEG (Parsing Expression Grammar).

PEG parsers are different from other types of parsers; they’re unambiguous. That means that plain text passing through a PEG parser has only one possible valid parsed output. We became excited about using the deterministic property of PEG to mix parsing rules and code, and that’s when we found peg.js.

With peg.js, we can generate a grammar that executes JavaScript code as it parses your document. This hybrid approach is super powerful. It allows us to have all of the advantages of using a parser formalism (like speed and unambiguity) while also allowing us to run custom JavaScript code on each bit of your document as it parses. That way we can use an external library, like the Sunlight Foundation’s fantastic citation, from inside the parser.

Our next step is to prototype an “interactive parser,” a tool for attorneys to define the structure of their documents and see how they parse. Behind the scenes, this interactive parser will generate peg.js programs and run them against plaintext without the user even being aware of how the underlying parser is written. We hope that this approach will provide users with the right balance of power and usability.

4. Moving Forwards

Restatement is going fully operational in June 2014. After launch, the two remaining challenges are to (a) continuing expanding the range of legal document features the parser will be able to successfully process, and (b) begin widely processing legal documents into the Restatement format.

For the first, we’re encouraging a community of legal technologists to play around with Restatement, break it as much as possible, and give us feedback. Running Restatement against a host of different legal documents and seeing where it fails will expose the areas that are necessary to bolster the parser to expand its potential applicability as far as possible.

For the second, Restatement will be rendering popular legal documents in the format, and partnering with platforms to integrate Restatement into the legal content they produce. We’re excited to say on launch Restatement will be releasing the standard form documents used by the startup accelerator Y Combinator, and Series Seed, an open source project around seed financing created by Fenwick & West.

It is worth adding that the Restatement team is always looking for collaborators. If what’s been described here interests you, please drop us a line! I’m available at tim@robotandhwang.org, and on Twitter @RobotandHwang.

Jason Boehmig is a corporate attorney at Fenwick & West LLP, a law firm specializing in technology and life science matters. His practice focuses on startups and venture capital, with a particular emphasis on early stage issues. He is an active maintainer of the Series Seed Documents, an open source set of equity financing documents. Prior to attending law school, Jason worked for Lehman Brothers, Inc. as an analyst and then as an associate in their Fixed Income Division.

Tim Hwang currently serves as the managing human partner at the offices of Robot, Robot & Hwang LLP. He is curator and chair for the Stanford Center on Legal Informatics FutureLaw 2014 Conference, and organized the New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference (NELIC) at Berkeley Law in 2010. He is also the founder of the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, a distributed, worldwide philanthropic organization founded to provide lightweight grants to projects that forward the interest of awesomeness in the universe. Previously, he has worked at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Creative Commons, Mozilla Foundation, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. For his work, he has appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, Wired Magazine, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, Fast Company, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He enjoys ice cream.

Paul Sawaya is a software developer currently working on Restatement, an open source toolkit to parse, manipulate, and publish legal documents on the web. He previously worked on identity at Mozilla, and studied computer science at Hampshire College.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

Building a Legal Research Ontology

Legal metadata, Legal ontologies, legal research 3 Responses »

Mar 192014

It’s hard for me to pin down exactly when I knew I wanted to build a legal research ontology. There was no light bulb moment; or perhaps I should say, there was no anvil falling on my head, Wile E. Coyote style. At the beginning of the fall 2012 semester, our Westlaw representative presented the newest features of Westlaw Next, including the new look of the headnotes in case law results. My first glance at it was jarring. At first I thought it was just the font and the streamlined interface, but after taking a closer look at it, I realized it was also the content.

The outline of the headnotes had been compressed. It was substantively different. Previously, each section of the key number system in your headnote was presented in outline form with indented lines and roman numerals, and you could click on any of the outline headings. In the new version, only the main key number heading and the section pertaining to the case are visible. While there is a Change View link in each case result that leads to the classic outline view, I am sceptical of it for a couple of reasons. One is that Westlaw has made the new look the default look and could at some point do away with the Change View option. Second, the new look becomes the look for each new class of law students. If style is all that is communicated by the interface, it would not be of much concern. But there is substance. There is function. How do we now communicate this substance? Should we be so dependent on vendors in legal research teaching? Given the paucity of time we have with first-year students, do we have other viable options?

These questions were in the back of my mind when I attended the LVI conference at Cornell later that semester. On the first day of the conference, I settled in to the Data Organization and Legal Informatics Track. By the end of the day, two of the presentations I heard, one on concept mapping and another on semantic web technologies using RDF and OWL, opened up a door to a new set of possibilities. One of the notes I scribbled during the conference was “ontology for westlaw problem?” I came back from the conference and began researching ontologies and ontology engineering. (I may have gone a little overboard. At last count, I have over 500 articles and book chapters.)

So what is an ontology exactly? Here’s the definition I’ve cobbled together from my readings and my subsequent translation of those readings into words I can actually understand. (Any conceptual errors are mine.) An ontology is a way to take a set of concepts and organize it in a formalized way (i.e., with standards and naming conventions and a machine-readable structure), using an ontology language that takes advantage of the semantic web. The rest of this blog post will be a more detailed description of this definition.

Before you can use the set of concepts to build the ontology, you have to define them. And when I first started thinking about this project, it was on a much grander scale. It didn’t take me long at all to realize that I could not single-handedly create a comprehensive ontology of U.S. law.

I decided to focus on what we do as legal research instructors. I’ve always thought that one of our primary duties is to show our students the big picture so they can be confident in their abilities to research in unfamiliar situations. Our teaching is complicated by the fact that very few of us have the kind of classroom time we would like, and even if we did, we are teaching concepts that students may not put to use for months afterwards. So I wanted this ontology to be something we could use to convey the big picture, as well as a tool our students could use at their point of need.

I further narrowed the focus of the ontology to what we teach 1Ls in basic legal research. We teach them how to research with primary and secondary sources (Type of Research Materials) in the broad categories of law they learn in their IL classes (Area of Law). We teach them about the types of law they will encounter (Type of Law). I also wondered if I could find a way to incorporate all the topics we teach them implicitly. Under the surface of black letter research is the knowledge that our students will be spending their summers as summer associates or summer interns. They will need to produce something tangible for a partner or a senior associate or a judge (Final Product). We’re not sending them out to do research as an intellectual exercise. Not only is something tangible expected from them, but they will also need to keep in mind that their work stems from some type of legal action (Legal Action). That legal action might be a breach of contract headed for litigation, or it might be the need to draft a contract between two parties, i.e., it could be litigation or a transaction.

Based on this focus, I had five classes: Type of Research Materials; Area of Law; Type of Law; Final Product; and Legal Action. I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in the Sixth Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching (known as “The Boulder Conference”) with a working paper on the ontology. Drawing from his work on legal research instruction, Paul Callister suggested I add another class, Type of Research Problem. I took his advice, and I am grateful to him for his generosity. And now the classes number six.

My next task was coming up with the terms for the ontology — filling it in, so to speak. Some of the terms were almost self-evident. Types of Law include case law and statutory law and regulations. Areas of Law include torts and civil procedure and property and contracts. For others, the First Decennial Digest is out of copyright and so those terms can be used. Most volumes are available digitally from either HathiTrust or LLMC. (The rest are on a shelf in my office.) Some of the terms are outdated, but most legal concepts change gradually over time. I am also grateful to Ed Walters for sharing Fastcase search results with me (completely stripped of any identifying user data and also deduped). Between these two sources, I haven’t yet run out of terms.

Selecting the ontology language was the easiest part of the endeavor. I learned about the Ontology Web Language (OWL) at the LII conference. In my readings, I had also run across the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and their standards for OWL (now in two versions, OWL 1 and OWL 2). If you really want to let your inner geek out for a romp, go there and happy fun times will be had.

I also needed a program to build the ontology using the W3C standards and naming conventions. Protege is a free and open-source software program developed and distributed by Stanford University. It comes with extensive user guides. It allows for the creation, sharing and publishing of ontologies, and it uses OWL. And fortunately, a voluminous amount has been written and presented on the topic of ontology engineering, from papers and book chapters to slide decks on sites like SlideShare.

At this point, I am in the beginning stages of taking advantage of all the semantic web has to offer. The ontology’s classes now have subclasses. I am building the relationships between the classes and subclasses, and using Protege to bring them all together. I am also prototyping lesson plans that can take advantage of the ontology. For example, if you write a problem for your students that requires them to research strict tort liability for failure to warn of the danger in the use of a product, you can also use the ontology to bring in the Restatement Third of Torts: Products Liability, as well as secondary sources such as treatises. You can also tie this into whatever final product you want your students to produce: a client letter; a memo to the firm; results of research into punitive damages awards, etc. As long as you have the ontology classes set up, you can add anything to them in order to personalize your research problem.

I also hope to host the ontology on a website with a section for instructors to share lesson plans and ontology files. The files from Protege use an .owl extension, so they can be shared as easily as a pdf. All you need is a program like Protege to open the file. You could use the file as-is or modify it for any type of legal research problem. I also hope that the complete ontology, consisting of the permutations of legal research, can be available for students to query when they are researching as associates and interns.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

Older Entries Newer Entries

Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha

§.1.- Foreword

§.2.- Introduction

§.3.- Folksonomies, Law, and «Quid juris?»: legal information management and collective tagging systems

§.4.- Folksonomies, Law, and «Quid jus?»: the difference between the “map” and the “territory”

§.5- Folksonomies, Law and «Cur jus?»: the user in folksonomies: from “anybody” to “somebody”

§.6- Conclusion

1. Bringing communication design to law

2. Our approach to complex communication design

Communication Design for Insight and Understanding

Communication Design for Decision-Making

Our Focus

3. The Class

The Design Bootcamp

The Legal Communication Problem and Use Cases

Use Case 1: “And Where Do I Sign?”

Use Case #2: “I am on the Run, Just Tell Me What to Do.”

Use Case #4: “You Want Me to Say What?”

The Design Sprint

4. Models that Emerged

Model 1: Embedded Notice

1a: Interactive Games

Model 2: Roadmap with Zoom

Model 3: Divide & Conquer

3a: The efficient, clean click-through

Model 4: Personalized, Conversational, Growing Agreement

Model 5: Proximate, Contextual Notification

Model 6: Protector Relationship

5. Ways Forward

About the Authors

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