Law Librarian Blog

ScheduAALL 2009: Share Your Personal AALL Annual Meeting Plans

Loyola Law School's Tom Boone has launched a very useful and fun personal scheduling application for attendees of the 2009 AALL Annual Meeting and Conference, ScheduAALL 2009. Take a tour of the app here. ScheduAALL can also be found on Facebook and Twitter. See also the ScheduAALL Blog.

Planning on meeting a vendor at a bar or restaurant? Post it to your ScheduAALL 2009 schedule so we all can converge there and max out the vendor's expense account. Seriously, Boone has implemented a great tool for networking with friends and colleagues at this year's annual meeting.

Hat tip to Sara Sampson (LLB Contributing Editor and Head of Reference at Georgetown Law Library) for pinging me via Facebook. [JH]

Call for Papers: Symposium on Computational Argumentation

A call for papers , deadline July 3, 2009, has been issued for a symposium on “The Uses of Computational Argumentation,” Nov. 5-7, 2009, in Washington D.C., as part of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s Fall Symposium Series.  Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Applications of argumentation systems

• Implementations of argumentation systems

• Argumentation and inconsistent information

• Argumentation and uncertain information

• Argumentation and decision making

• Argumentation as an interaction mechanism

• Multiagent argumentation

• Formal models of argumentation

The symposium organizers include two international leaders in legal information systems research, Dr. Henry Prakken and Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon. For more details, see the symposium website. Hat tip to the IAAIL blog. [Robert Richards]

CALI Adds Social Media Best Practices Workshop to CALI Conference Agenda

CALI is hosting a Social Media Best Practices Workshop at this year's CALI Conference to help law schools develop a better understanding of these technologies, as well as suggested guidelines for law schools regarding the use of social media. See Austin Groothuis' post for details. Conference details below. [JH]

Tools for Change CALI Conference
June 18 - 20 2009
University of Colorado Law School, Boulder

Call for Papers: Cyberspace 2009 Conference

Important dates:

Abstract submission deadline: July 31 2009

Notice on acceptance deadline: Aug. 31 2009

Full papers deadline: Dec. 31 2009

A call for papers has been issued for the 7th International Cyberspace Conference to be held 20-21 November 2009, in Brno, Czech Republic.  Submissions are invited for a workshop on "Theory of Cyberlaw," on topics including legal informatics and artificial intelligence & law; and a workshop on "e-Government/e-Justice," including the topics: "electronic filing, electronic public submissions, videoconferences, on-line dispute settlement, re-use of public sector information, on-line public procurement, legal information systems, on-line access to law and case-law, data mining systems for lawyers, electronic storage of documents, [and] on-line legal counseling."  The conference is organized by the Faculty of Law in cooperation with the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno and the Faculty of Law, Charles University, Prague.  For more details, see the complete call for papers. Hat tip to Charles Christian. [Robert Richards]

Artificial Intelligence and Law Workshop in Beijing, Sept. 2009

A special workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Law  will be held Sept. 15-16, 2009 in Beijing, in conjunction with the 24th World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR World Congress). The workshop will focus on legal multilingual ontologies, multiagent systems, and distributed networks. "The aim of the workshop is . . . to offer effective support for the exchange of knowledge and methodological approaches between scholars from different scientific fields, by highlighting their similarities and differences. The comparison of multiple formal approaches to the law - such as logical models, cognitive theories, argumentation frameworks, graph theory, game theory, as well as opposite perspectives like the internal and the external viewpoints - should stress possible convergences in the realm, say, of conceptual structures, argumentation schemes, emergent behaviors, learning evolution, adaptation, simulation, etc." [Robert Richards]

Call for Papers, Deadline Extended: ICEGOV 2009

The call for papers has been extended until May 1, 2009, for the 3rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV2009), to be held in Bogota, Colombia, November 10-13, 2009.  The organizers especially welcome submissions "that cross the borders of the relevant disciplines - Information Technology, Computing, Public Administration and Policy, Political Science, Information Science, Linguistics, Law," etc.  For more information, see the complete call (click on "CALL"). {Robert Richards]

IALL Meeting in Istanbul, Turkey

The International Association of Law Libraries's (IALL) 28th annual course on international law librarianship will be held in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 11-15, 2009. Titled "Turkey in a Global Context: Law & Legal Information," it will examine: (1) Turkey's legal system & legal literature; (2) digital developments & the legal system; and (3) Turkey & the European Union. Registration opens in early May. I am unsure whether I will be able to attend. But I did attend IALL's 26th annual course held in Mumbai, India, in 2007 along with around 100 other law librarians from all over the world. I learned much and was impressed greatly with the course host, organizers, and participants. I am confident that this year's course will be just as instructive and impressive. [RLS]

Law via the Internet Conference

A summary of the most recent "Law via the Internet" Conference, the annual meeting of legal information institutes and the "free access to law" movement, is now available on the VoxPopuLII blog.

Conference panel topics included:

• The Right to Access Legal Information

• Free Access to Law: Information Systems and Institutions in Europe

• A Legal Framework for Open Access to Legal Information

• The Global Scope of Free Access to Law

• Information and Communication Technologies and the Quality of Legal Information

• Strategic Solutions and Sustainability Models for the Diffusion and Sharing of Legal Knowledge

The summary is by Dr. Enrico Francesconi and Dr. Ginevra Peruginelli, both well-known legal informatics scholars at the Institute of Legal Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG-CNR). Slides and abstracts of the conference presentations are available here and the proceedings will be published this month by European Press Academic Publishing. [Robert Richards]

Yale Law School Library 2.0 Symposium

Summaries and slides of presentations at the April 4 Yale Law School Library 2.0 Symposium are available here. The panels addressed the topics "The Future of the Library," "Ethics and Politics of Library 2.0," "The Challenge of Copyright," and "Digitizing Collections." Here's the Twitter feed for the symposium. [Robert Richards]

Call for Papers: Natural Language Engineering of Legal Argumentation

A call for papers has been issued for a “Workshop on the Natural Language Engineering of Legal Argumentation: Language, Logic, and Computation” (NaLELA), to be held June 12, 2009, at the Institute of Law and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, in conjunction with ICAIL 2009, the Twelfth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.  Submission deadline is April 3, 2009.  “[T]he workshop focuses particularly on the language, logic, and computation of legal argumentation such as that found between lawyers arguing a case before a court or found in legal briefs and decisions where justifications are given for and against a decision.” Recommended topics include:

• Corpus development
• Corpus analysis and text mining
• Logical analysis of legal language
• Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism
• Legal argument schemes
• Pilot implementations of tools
• Defeasible reasoning systems for the law with natural language interfaces
• Burden of proof in argumentation
• Consistency, inconsistency, and compatibility of statements in the law
• Coherence in legal argumentation
• The identification of enthymemes (missing premises due to presupposition with respect to common knowledge and shared knowledge)
• Legal argument modification
• The generation of legal arguments
• Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments
• Dialogue protocols for argumentation
• Legal argument ontology
• Legal Ontologies with associated lexical information
• Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language.

For more details, see the complete call for papers. [Robert Richards]

Time to Start Planning for the DC Meeting: Check Out the AALL Local Arrangements Committee's Website

OK, DC isn't my favorite site for a convention. Las Vegas is. Just ask LLB co-editor Ron Jones who I had to put to bed early every night because he didn't have the poker playing stamina to keep up with someone 20+ years older (ah, me) when we were in LV for CALI a couple of years ago.

And DC isn't my second favorite convention site. New Orleans is but my wife won't let me go back there for some strange reason. So, wait, that does make DC my second favorite site and its time for attendees to start planning for AALL's meeting there.

I've also been informed by my wife that DC is a great place to bring your spouse (read chaperon). While I wiggle out of this conundrum, check out the Local Arrangements Committee great website for D.C. guides (restaurants, music venues, government buildings, museums, and more), dine-around and volunteer sign up, forums for finding a roommate or trading an event ticket, and more. 

The Local Arrangements Committee [roster] really makes our annual meeting possible and their site is very useful for making the meeting enjoyable. All committee members deserve our thanks for the long hours they put it. [JH]

PS: It's a little early for content but not too early to grab the RSS feed for the convention blog, Capital Crier, edited by Todd Venie (Georgetown).

Tools for Change: CALI's Annual Conference

19th Annual Conference for Law School Computing
Thursday to Saturday, June 18 - 20 2009
University of Colorado Law School, Boulder CO.

Registration and hotel information here. A preliminary agenda will be available around May 15th. Sessions that have been accepted so far include

• Firefox Add-ons for Legal Research
• Rich Internet Applications with the Adobe Flash Platform
• Crowdsourcing and Open Access v2.0: Harnessing the Power of Peer Production to Disseminate Historical Records and Legal Scholarship
• Why is there Hot Pizza in my classroom? Room and Course Scheduling
• Multimedia Tools for Law School
• Cloud Computing, Web Services, and the New Web Stack
• Coursecrafting: (def.) Mashing up legal research, moot court, skills training and instructional technology into something new and innovative!
• Using LibGuides to build Legal Research Guides

Details on the above sessions here. Look's to be another excellent CALI conference. [JH]

Call for Papers: Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology

Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology, Poznan, Poland, April 28, 2009.

Submission details: at http://bis.kie.ae.poznan.pl/12th_bis/wscfp.php?ws=lit2009 .
Submission deadline: Feb. 22, 2009

Here is a description: The Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology workshop held as part of the 12th International Conference on Business Information Systems. The BIS Conference is held annually and is a leading world conference in the area of Business Information Systems. Submissions are rigorously refereed. Accepted papers are published in the Springer's Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing Series. After a long hiatus, the domain of Law and Information Technology is finally receiving much attention, not only from researchers, but also from practitioners. Hence there is a need for forums that discuss new research and innovative applications in Law and Information Technology.

Call for papers: The workshop is receptive to all papers dealing with any topic in the interdisciplinary domain of Law and Information Technology.

Topics

• Automated semantic indexing, information extraction and categorization of legal documents
• Computational models for legal reasoning
• Information Technology and Dispute Resolution
• Information Technology and Crime Prevention
• Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Law
• Knowledge management in the legal domain
• Legal argumentation
• Legal discourse modeling and legal reasoning
• Legal electronic agents
• Legal Expert Systems
• Legal ontologies and their creation and use
• Legal reasoning and its computer representation
• Natural language processing in law
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Question answering retrieval in law and governmental services
• Risk management in law
• Semantic Web technologies for law and e-government
• Specialized knowledge representation and logics for law
• Text mining and knowledge extraction in law

[Robert Richards]

How We Were Ruined: On the Financial Industry Meltdown and How Lawyers Enabled It

In the New York Review of Books, Jeff Madrick provides an excellent analysis and commentary of the current financial crisis using Charles Morris' The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, Mark Zandi's Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis, and the New York Times series of articles titled The Reckoning as springboards for his thoughts. Very insightful.

Terry Carter covers the legal profession's contribution to the financial crisis in the ABA Journal article How Lawyers Enabled The Meltdown And How They Might Have Prevented It. Carter's article opens with the following:

In the game of blame that followed the deepest financial implosion since the Great De­pression, bankers and money managers have borne their share of attention. But how much blame should lawyers bear? Plenty.

As legislators, they helped remove restrictions on commercial banks that allowed them to get involved with subprime mortgage-backed securities.

As regulators, they allowed leverage at investment banks to increase largely unchecked. As judges, they made it harder for shareholders to bring suits to stop the financial shenanigans.

As counsel, their legal opinions gave sanction to deals that, in the words of the analysts behind them, “could have been structured by cows.”

There were also lawyers who did their jobs, only to find their voices lost in torrents of money, rationalization or plainspoken hostility toward the rule of regulation.

[JH]

Tech Trends and Copyright at ALA

ALA’s Midwinter meeting featured two programs of particular interest to law librarians. Georgia Harper’s presentation on copyright and open access, “OA, IRs and IP: Open Access, Digital Copyright and Marketplace Competition," [paper | slides] sponsored by ALA ALCTS, makes the case that the social costs of copyright outweigh its benefits in the digital environment.  And in “Top Tech Trends,” [video | follow-up discussion] sponsored by ALA LITA, a group of library technology experts discusses the most recent developments in technology affecting libraries.  The topics include open source software, geographic data, linked data, the OAI-ORE standard for enabling retrieval of digital objects, RFID and automated circulation, automation of ILL presearching, advance shipping notice for acquisitions, the demise of print newspapers, environmental impact of technology, self-publishing services, the need to present evidence-based justifications for technology spending in lean times, decisionmaking for adopting new technology, use of multiple screens, digital preservation, discovery interfaces, and the integration of Web 2.0 tools into library technology.  Hat tip to Roy Tennant. [Robert Richards].

Conference on The Law Librarian’s Role in the Scholarly Enterprise

The Law Librarian’s Role in the Scholarly Enterprise is the theme for a conference sponsored by the Coleman Karesh Law Library and the University of South Carolina School of Law.

Friday, November 21, 2008
University of South Carolina School of Law
Columbia, South Carolina

This conference will explore the librarian’s role in legal scholarship, focusing on the effects of technological changes in the production and delivery of legal information and the possibilities of collaboration between scholars and librarians to advance legal scholarship. Visit the conference website for details.

American War Criminals Conference Streamed Live This Weekend

The Justice Robert Jackson Conference on the Planning for Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals (September 13-14, 2008) will be streamed live this weekend. The speakers list includes former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, author of the book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder; Phillippe Sands, director of the Centre of International Courts and Tribunals at University College, London, and author of Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values; Jordan Paust, law professor and author of Beyond The Law: The Bush Administration's Unlawful Responses in the 'War' on Terror; Ann Wright, the former U.S. Army colonel who wrote Dissent:  Voices of Conscience; Peter Weiss, vice president of the Center For Constitutional Rights; Benjamin Davis, former American legal counsel for the Secretariat of the International Court of Arbitration; David Lindorff, co-author of The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office; and Francis Boyle, law professor and author of Breaking All the Rules: Palestine, Iraq, Iran and the Case for Impeachment.

Conference Website | Agenda | Link to Stream

Hat tip to Bob Ambrogi, Legal Blog Watch. LOL, thanks to the commenter for catching my typo in the title of this post. Ain't dyslexia a wonderful thing! [JH]

ILTA 2008 Is Underway

The 31st annual educational conference of the International Legal Technology Association is under way. The theme of the four day conference, Global Perspective, Peer Advantage, "conveys that attendees, regardless of size or location, can gain something from adopting a global perspective and gain an incredible advantage from meeting with peers." Check out the conference website and blog. [JH]

AALS: "It will be possible for someone to attend any part of the [annual] meeting without setting foot in the Hyatt"

As previously reported at The Proposed AALS Meeting Boycott: Much Ado About Something, But What?, some law school groups wanted to boycott the January 2009 AALS annual meeting because the owner of one of the two meeting sites was a donor to the campaign to bar gay marriage in California. The site at issue was the Manchester Grand Hyatt and its owner, Doug Manchester, was using personal, not corporate, funds to finance the expression of his political preference on the issue.

The AALS has announced that it is keeping its annual meeting in San Diego, but it will not hold any events at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. Instead, it will hold all AALS events at the San Diego Marriott. "In this way, it will be possible for someone to attend any part of the meeting without setting foot in the Hyatt."

The AALS announcement led to a fury of posts about whether and to what extent Doug Manchester owned an interest in the San Diego Marriott. According to Does Doug Manchester Still Own the San Diego Marriott?, Manchester's interest in the San Diego Marriott amounts to something like 2%. Small enough?

Update: AALS has edited the above-linked page, removing the "without setting foot in the Hyatt" language I quoted from the original announcement. Attitude adjustment? Was there, now gone. [JH]

NALSWD's Annual Conference Starts Today

The National Association of Law Students with Disabilities (NALSWD) is a coalition of law students dedicated to disability advocacy and the achievement of equal access, inclusion, diversity and non-discrimination in legal education and in the legal profession. The Association's second annual conference begins today with a career fair and reception and runs through Sunday, August 17th at the Crystal City Sheraton in Arlington, VA.

The Conference shifts into high gear Saturday with sessions on disability law and advocacy, plus panels featuring (1) recent law school grads with disabilities discussing their experiences with job searching, the bar exam, and transitions to professional life, and (2) lawyers with disabilities employed by the federal government and law firms discussing their career paths and experiences. The Honorable Chief Judge Richard S. Brown, Wisconsin Court of Appeals, will be the Conference's keynote speaker Saturday evening. [Conference Agenda]

Stop by, if you can. The Conference is open to all. Hopefully some law librarians are going to attend. Local representatives from legal publishers should attend. Why? To hear about what their employers are not doing to accomodate law students and lawyers with disabilities. The state of affairs is shameful. I will not be attending this year's conference but at the Association's 2006 organizing meeting in DC and its first annual conference in San Francisco in 2007 I did not hear one criticism of legal publishing practices that could not be resolved by a small dose of 20th century technology. [JH]