Information Sources in Law


Book Description

The aim of each volume of this series Guides to Information Sources is to reduce the time which needs to be spent on patient searching and to recommend the best starting point and sources most likely to yield the desired information. The criteria for selection provide a way into a subject to those new to the field and assists in identifying major new or possibly unexplored sources to those who already have some acquaintance with it. The series attempts to achieve evaluation through a careful selection of sources and through the comments provided on those sources.




Legal Knowledge and Information Systems


Book Description

The field of legal knowledge and information systems has traditionally been concerned with the subjects of legal knowledge representation and engineering, computational models of legal reasoning, and the analysis of legal data, but recent years have also seen an increasing interest in the application of machine learning methods to ease and empower the everyday activities of legal experts. This book presents the proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2020), organised this year as a virtual event on 9–11 December 2020 due to restrictions resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. For more than three decades, the annual JURIX international conference, which now also includes demo papers, has provided a platform for academics and practitioners to exchange knowledge about theoretical research and applications in concrete legal use cases. A total of 85 submissions by 255 authors from 28 countries were received for the conference, and after a rigorous review process, 20 were selected for publication as full papers, 14 as short papers, and 5 as demo papers. This selection process resulted in a total acceptance rate of 40% (full and short papers) and a competitive 23.5% acceptance rate for full papers. Topics span from computational models of legal argumentation, case-based reasoning, legal ontologies, smart contracts, privacy management and evidential reasoning to information extraction from different types of text in legal documents, and ethical dilemmas. Providing a state-of-the-art overview of developments in the field, this book will be of interest to all those working with legal knowledge and information systems.




Approaches to Legal Ontologies


Book Description

The book provides the reader with a unique source regarding the current theoretical landscape in legal ontology engineering as well as on foreseeable future trends for the definition of conceptual structures to enhance the automatic processing and retrieval of legal information in the Semantic Web framework. It will thus interest researchers in the domains of the SW, legal informatics, Artificial Intelligence and law, legal theory and legal philosophy, as well as developers of e-government applications based on the intelligent management of legal or public information to provide both back-office and front-office support.




Law and the Semantic Web


Book Description

by Roberto Cencioni At the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, European heads of state and government set a new goal for the European Union — to become the most competitive knowled- based society in the world by 2010. As part of this objective, ICT (information and communication technologies) services should become available for every citizen, and for all schools, homes and businesses. The book you have in front of you is about Semantic Web technology and law. Law is something omnipresent; all citizens — at some points in their lives — have to deal with it. In addition, law involves a large group of professionals, and is a mul- billion business world wide. Information technology is important because it that can improve citizens’ interaction with law, as well as improve legal professionals’ work environment. Legal professionals dedicate a significant amount of their time to finding, reading, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to take decisions, and prepare advice and trials, among other tasks. As part of the “Semantic-Based Knowledge and Content Systems” Strategic Objective, the European Commission is funding projects to construct technology to make the Semantic Web vision come true. 1 The articles in this book are related to two current foci of the Strategic Objective : • Knowledge acquisition and modelling, capturing knowledge from raw information and multimedia content in webs and other distributed repositories to turn poorly structured information into machi- processable knowledge.




AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems XI-XII


Book Description

This book includes revised selected papers from the International Workshops on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, AICOL-XI@JURIX2018, held in Groningen, The Netherlands, on December 12, 2018; AICOL-XII@JURIX 2020, held in Brno, Czechia, on December 9, 2020; XAILA@JURIX 2020, held in in Brno, Czechia, on December 9, 2020.*The 17 full and 4 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected form 39 submissions. They represent a comprehensive picture of the state of the art in legal informatics. The papers are logically organized in 5 blocks: ​Knowledge Representation; Logic, rules, and reasoning; Explainable AI in Law and Ethics; Law as Web of linked Data and the Rule of Law; Data protection and Privacy Modelling and Reasoning. *Due to the Covid-19 pandemic AICOL-XII@JURIX 2020 and XAILA@JURIX 2020 were held virtually.




Introduction to Italian Law


Book Description

Introduction to the Laws.....Series Volume 4 This is a methodologically advanced introduction to the main features of the Italian Legal System. Its eighteen chapters cover all the significant changes and innovations that have recently taken place, including: a new system of private international law; a greatly altered and expanded body of family law; a new code of criminal procedure; fundamental changes in civil procedure; the effects of European legislation on Italian municipal law; the reformation of administrative law; and the latest computer-assisted research tools and techniques used to research Italian law. Written for academics and lawyers alike, this book is an indispensable tool for those wishing to grasp the context of Italian legal activity. Written by Italian experts at the top of their respective fields, An Introduction to Italian Law is a readable yet technically sophisticated and critical discussion of the systemic features that make the Italian legal system a landmark of the civil law tradition.




Formal Linguistics and Law


Book Description

The volume explores new interfaces between linguistics and jurisprudence. Its theoretical and methodological importance lies in showing that many questions asked within language and law receive satisfactory answers from formal linguistics, including computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, translation studies, psycholinguistics, semantics, phonetics and corpus linguistics.




Legal Ontology Engineering


Book Description

Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed. During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments. This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.




Knowledge of the Law in the Big Data Age


Book Description

The changes brought about by digital technology and the consequent explosion of information known as Big Data have brought opportunities and challenges in all areas of society, and the law is no exception. This book, Knowledge of the Law in the Big Data Age contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference ‘Law via the Internet 2018’, held in Florence, Italy, on 11-12 October 2018. This annual conference of the ‘Free Access to Law Movement’ (http://www.fatlm.org) hosted more than 60 international speakers from universities, government and research bodies as well as EU institutions. Topics covered range from free access to law and Big Data and data analytics in the legal domain, to policy issues concerning access, publishing and the dissemination of legal information, tools to support democratic participation and opportunities for digital democracy. The book is divided into 3 sections: Part I provides an introductory background, covering aspects such as the evolution of legal science and models for representing the law; Part II addresses the present and future of access to law and to various legal information sources; and Part III covers updates in projects, initiatives, and concrete achievements in the field. The book provides an overview of the practical implementation of legal information systems and the tools to manage this special kind of information, as well as some of the critical issues which must be faced, and will be of interest to all those working at the intersection of law and technology.