John Sheridan, Head of e-Services in the Information Policy and Services Directorate of The National Archives. Is one of the main people behind data.gov.uk and legislation.gov.uk.

Wiebe van der Hoek, member of the Agent ART Group at the University of Liverpool. His research in agents concentrates on Logics for Agent Systems, Cooperation, Negotiation, Gamesand Agents, Data Mining and the Semantic Web.

13th International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence & Law (ICAIL 2011)
June 6 – June 10, 2011
University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
http://www.law.pitt.edu/icail2011

Call for Papers

The field of AI and Law is concerned with the study of legal reasoning using computational methods; computational models of argumentation; knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining; and the formal representation of norms, normative actions, normative systems, norm-governed societies, and multi-agent systems. The field also includes the investigation of techniques from advanced information technology, using law as the illustrative domain; and applications of advanced information technology to support tasks in the legal domain.

ICAIL provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest research results and practical applications and stimulates interdisciplinary and international collaboration. Previous ICAIL conferences have been held biennially since 1987, with proceedings published by ACM. The journal Artificial Intelligence and Law regularly publishes expanded versions of selected ICAIL papers.

For more information about this call, see the conference website.

ICAIL Workshops and Tutorials

ICAIL 2011 will include workshops and tutorials on the first and last days. Proposals for workshops and tutorials are invited, and should be sent to the Program Chair. Tutorials should cover a broad topic of relevance to the AI and Law community. Proposals should contain enough information to permit evaluation on the basis of importance, quality, and community interest. Each workshop should have one or more designated organizers and a program or organizing committee. Proposals should be about 2 to 4 pages and include at least the following information

• The workshop or tutorial topic and goals, their significance, and their appropriateness for ICAIL 2011
• The intended audience, including the areas from which participants may come, the likely number of participants (with some of their names, if known), and plans for publicizing the workshop
• Organization of the workshop or tutorial, including the intended format (such as invited talks, presentations, panel discussions, or other methods for ensuring an interactive atmosphere) and the expected length (full day or half day)
• Organizers’ details: a description of the main organizers’ background in the proposed topic; and complete addresses including web pages of all organizers and committee members (if applicable).

Mentoring Program for ICAIL 2011

The International Association for AI and Law will offer a mentoring program for papers being submitted to the ICAIL conference. The mentoring program is intended primarily for junior authors who have not previously published an Artificial Intelligence and Law paper at a conference or in a journal.

Important Dates

These dates are tentative and subject to change

• Mentoring program request deadline: November 8, 2010
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 15, 2010
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 6, 2010
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 3, 2011
• Submission of papers deadline: January 10, 2011
• Notification of acceptance: tba
• Final revised and formatted papers due: tba
• Conference: June 6 – June 10, 2011

Submission Details

Papers should not exceed 5000 words. If an approved style file is used, the maximum length is 10 pages. Style format template files can be found athttp://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Papers should be submitted by the above paper submission deadline, in PDF or MS Word format.

To aid the reviewing process, authors are requested to submit abstracts of their papers by the above abstract submission deadline. Abstracts should include at least the title of the paper, up to four keywords, and a contact address for the author.

Both papers and abstracts should be submitted electronically to the conference support system (details to be announced).

Authors will be notified of the referees’ decision in March 2011. Papers not accepted for full publication and presentation may be accepted as short research abstracts. Papers (including research abstracts) must be presented at the conference in order to appear in the proceedings. Final versions of papers for publication in the proceedings will be due in April 2011.

Donald H. Berman Award for Best Student Paper

To encourage participation by students, IAAIL has created the Donald H. Berman Award for the best paper submitted to ICAIL by a student or students. The award consists of a cash gift and free attendance at ICAIL 2011. For a paper to be considered for the award, the student author(s) should be clearly designated as such when the paper is submitted, and any nonstudent co-authors should provide a statement that the paper is primarily student work. Notification will be made through the ICAIL website, and the award will be presented at the conference banquet.

Conference Officials

Program Chair
Tom van Engers
Leibniz Center for Law/Faculty of Law
University of Amsterdam
http://www.leibnizcenter.org
vanengers@uva.nl

Conference Chair
Kevin D. Ashley
Professor of Law and Intelligent Systems
University of Pittsburgh School of Law
ashley@pitt.edu

Secretary/Treasurer
Anne Gardner
Atherton, California, USA
gardner.anne@sbcglobal.net

The registration deadline for the LEX Summer School held from 6th-11th September in Ravenna, Italy has been extended to the 23rd of July. The registration form is available online on the website of the summer school. OASIS members have a 10% discount.

University of Liverpool (U.K.), 16th-17th December 2010

http://conference.jurix.nl/2010

For more than 20 years the Jurix Conference has provided an international forum for academics and practitioners in the field of legal informatics for sharing ideas and experiences on the representation of legal content and its representation in computer systems. We invite submission of original papers on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge (foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications). For a list of potential topics see the conference web site.

Papers should be submitted through the Jurix Conference Management System, using PDF, PostScript or Word format, and should not exceed 10 pages when formatted using the styles and guidelines in the Instructions for Authors.

The conference proceedings will be published by IOS Press (Amsterdam, Berlin, Oxford, Tokyo, Washington DC) in their series “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications” before the Conference.

Program Committee Chair
Radboud Winkels, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Organisation Committee Chair
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, U.K.

Important Dates

• August 29th, 2010 Deadline for submission of abstracts
• September 5th, 2010 Deadline for submission of papers
• September 19th, 2010 Deadline for submission of tutorials, workshops and demonstration proposals
• October 1st, 2010 Notification of paper acceptance
• October 17th, 2010 Camera-ready papers due
• December (14th and) 15th, 2010 Jurix Workshops/Tutorials
• December 16th-17th, 2010 Jurix 2010 Main Conference

Fourth International Workshop on Juris-informatics(JURISIN 2010)

Nov. 18-19, 2010
Campus Innovation Center Tokyo
Tokyo, Japan

http://research.nii.ac.jp/~ksatoh/jurisin2010.html

With a support of The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, in association with Second JSAI International Symposia on AI (JSAI-isAI 2010)

http://ai-gakkai.or.jp/jsai-isai/2010/

Aims and scope

Juris-informatics is a new research area which studies legal issues from the perspective of informatics. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss both the fundamental and practical issues for juris-informatics among people from the various backgrounds such as law, social science, information and intelligent technology, logic and philosophy, including the conventional “AI and law” area.

We solicit unpublished papers on theories, technologies and applications on juris-informatics.

Topics

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Legal reasoning
• Argumentation/Argumentation agent
• Legal term ontology
• Formal legal knowledge-base/Intelligent management of legal knowledge-base
• Translation of legal documents
• Computer-aided law education
• Use of Informatics and AI in law
• Legal issues on ubiquitous computing/multi-agent system/the Internet
• Social implications of use of informatics and AI in law

Submissions

We welcome and encourage the submission of high quality, original papers, which are not simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline:
September 13, 2010

Notification:
October 12, 2010

Camera Ready Copy due:
October 19, 2010

JURISIN 2010:
November 18-19, 2010

Workshop Chair

Satoshi Tojo, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(JAIST), Japan

Organizing Committee Members

• Katsumi Nitta, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
• Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics and Sokendai, Japan
• Seiichiro Sakurai, Meiji Gakuin University, Japan

For any enquiry, please send it to “jurisin2010 at nii.ac.jp”.

This Wordle was made using the titles of all papers published in the Jurix conference proceedings since 1991.

Jurix is now also on Twitter! Follow us via @jurixfoundation.

The periodical “Rechtstreeks” of the Dutch Council of the Judiciary (Raad voor de Rechtspraak) contains an overview by Marc van Opijnen (BISTRO) on the state of the art and new opportunities of Web 3.0  technology for publishing legal sources in general, and court decisions in particular (in Dutch).

Rechtspraak en digitale rechtsbronnen: nieuwe kansen, nieuwe plichten

Sinds de komst van internet is de informatievoorziening voor en door de rechterlijke macht in een stroomversnelling geraakt. Waar rechters en griffiers vroeger vele uren nodig waren om in wetten, tijdschriften en boeken argumenten voor beslissingen bijeen te zoeken kan dat nu via sites en zoekmachines. Toch kan er nog veel verbeterd worden.

In dit nummer van Rechtstreeks geeft de rechtsinformaticus Marc van Opijnen een overzicht van de vele nieuwe verworvenheden op het gebied van bronnenonderzoek, maar hij gaat ook in op de verschillende stagnaties die optreden. Zo is er nog steeds weinig uniformiteit in het weergeven van uitspraken, wetten en regelingen en dreigen gebruikers door een gebrekkige structuur en een overvloed aan informatie de weg kwijt te raken. Hij pleit er daarom voor dat rechters als belangrijke producenten en consumenten van het recht zich meer bewust worden van de ongekende mogelijkheden die de automatisering biedt.

Daarnaast pleit de auteur ervoor dat, nu commerciële uitgevers het monopolie op juridische literatuur zijn kwijtgeraakt, ook andere wettelijke belemmeringen voor een snelle en vrije uitwisseling van teksten en bronnen moeten verdwijnen.
Van Opijnen denkt dat de kosten en inspanningen die een dergelijke omslag van de rechterlijke macht vergt, ruimschoots kunnen worden terugverdiend door de hogere productiviteit en de kwaliteit die erdoor ontstaat. Hij voorziet een situatie waarin rechters al meteen aan het begin van hun werk met één druk op de knop over een handzaam overzicht beschikken van alle bronnen die voor hun zaak van belang kunnen zijn.

http://bit.ly/a3wpGc (pdf)

More information about the project can be found here (Dutch):

http://www.utwente.nl/nieuws/ut-onderzoekt-online-tool-voor-rechtshulp

Related projects and contributions by Jurix member organizations:

BEST, http://www.best-project.nl (VU University Amsterdam)
Legal Services Counter (University of Amsterdam, Tilburg University)