Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Sustainable And Open Access To Valuable Legal Research Information: A New Framework, Alex Zhang, James Hart

Scholarly Articles

This article evaluates the current status of access to foreign and international legal research information, analyzes the challenges that information providers have experienced in providing valuable and sustainable access, and proposes a model that would help create and facilitate effective and sustainable access to valuable foreign, comparative, and international legal information.

Can Accessibility Liberate The "Lost Ark" Of Scholarly Work?: University Library Institutional Repositories Are "Places Of Public Accommodation”, 52 Uic J. Marshall L. Rev. 327 (2019), Raizel Liebler, Gregory Cunningham

UIC Law Review

For any body of knowledge – an ark of power or a corpus of scholarship – to be studied and used by people, it needs to be accessible to those seeking information. Universities, through their libraries, now aim to make more of the scholarship produced available for free to all through institutional repositories. However, the goal of being truly open for an institutional repository is more than the traditional definition of open access. It also means openness in a more general sense. Creating a scholarship-based online space also needs to take into consideration potential barriers for people with disabilities. This …

How Many Copies Are Enough Revisited: Open Access Legal Scholarship In The Time Of Collection Budget Constraints, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article discusses the results of a study into the open access availability of law reviews, followed by a discussion of why open access has such a high rate of adoption among law reviews, especially in comparison to the journal literature in other disciplines.

The Anonymity Heuristic: How Surnames Stop Identifying People When They Become Trademarks, Russell W. Jacobs

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article explores the following question central to trademark law: if a homograph has both a surname and a trademark interpretation will consumers consider those interpretations as intrinsically overlapping or the surname and trademark as completely separate and unrelated words? While trademark jurisprudence typically has approached this question from a legal perspective or with assumptions about consumer behavior, this Article builds on the Law and Behavioral Science approach to legal scholarship by drawing from the fields of psychology, linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.

The Article concludes that consumers will regard the two interpretations as separate and unrelated, processing surname …

Sustainable And Open Access To Valuable Legal Research Information: A New Framework, Alex Zhang, James Hart

Faculty Scholarship

This article evaluates the current status of access to foreign and international legal research information, analyzes the challenges that information providers have experienced in providing valuable and sustainable access, and proposes a model that would help create and facilitate effective and sustainable access to valuable foreign, comparative, and international legal information.

Exploring Diversity With A "Culture Box" In First-Year Legal Writing, Ann N. Sinsheimer

Articles

Studying law is in many ways like studying another culture. Students often feel as though they are learning a new language with unfamiliar vocabulary and different styles of communication. Throughout their legal education, students are also exposed to a profession comprised of unique traditions and expectations. As a result, learning law takes time and energy. It can be both engaging and frustrating and may even challenge some of students’ values and belief systems. To ease her students’ transition to law school, the author starts her course each year with a “culture box” exercise, which encourages students to examine who they …

Stepping Up Access To The Indiana Code: Partnering For Increased Access And Preservation, Susan David Demaine, Benjamin J. Keele, Hannah Alcasid

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Automatically Extracting Meaning From Legal Texts: Opportunities And Challenges, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

This paper examines impressive new applications of legal text analytics in automated contract review, litigation support, conceptual legal information retrieval, and legal question answering against the backdrop of some pressing technological constraints. First, artificial intelligence (Al) programs cannot read legal texts like lawyers can. Using statistical methods, Al can only extract some semantic information from legal texts. For example, it can use the extracted meanings to improve retrieval and ranking, but it cannot yet extract legal rules in logical form from statutory texts. Second, machine learning (ML) may yield answers, but it cannot explain its answers to legal questions or …

Using Ai To Analyze Patent Claim Indefiniteness, Dean Alderucci, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

In this Article, we describe how to use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to partially automate a type of legal analysis, determining whether a patent claim satisfies the definiteness requirement. Although fully automating such a high-level cognitive task is well beyond state-of-the-art AI, we show that AI can nevertheless assist the decision maker in making this determination. Specifically, the use of custom AI technology can aid the decision maker by (1) mining patent text to rapidly bring relevant information to the decision maker attention, and (2) suggesting simple inferences that can be drawn from that information.

We begin by summarizing the …

Navigating Scholarship Discovery, Research Impact, And Open Access, Carol A. Watson, Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Gregg Gordon

Presentations

The leadership teams of bepress and SSRN will present the findings of an integration pilot conducted in partnership with Columbia Law School’s Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, the University of Georgia School of Law’s Alexander Campbell King Law Library, and Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. Expanding the reach of open access scholarship is central to the mission of both bepress and SSRN. However for many institutions, the separation of the two platforms had created barriers to faculty engagement and the building of successful open access initiatives. With both companies now part of the Elsevier portfolio, it seemed the …

Law Library Blog (November 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Shepard’S, Keycite, And Bcite For Case Validation Accuracy, Paul Hellyer

Library Staff Publications

This study evaluates and compares how accurately three legal citators (Shepard’s, KeyCite, and BCite) identify negative treatment of case law, based on a review of 357 citing relationships that at least one citator labeled as negative. In this sample, Shepard’s and KeyCite missed or mislabeled about one-third of negative citing relationships, while BCite missed or mislabeled over two-thirds. The citators’ relative performance is less clear when examining the most serious citator errors, examples of which can be found in all three citators.

Law Library Blog (September 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (August 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

A Content Analysis Of Section 1983 Litigation Against Reserve Police Officers, Michael Ryan Broadus

Master's Theses

Police studies have well developed a demonstrative framework for detailing risks which generate financially-detrimental civil litigation – particularly regarding 42 U.S.C. §1983. Conversely, though, police studies have given little attention to the often-used but differentially-trained reserve police officer. Primarily replicating the methodologies of Kappeler, Kappeler, and del Carmen (1993) and Ross (2000), this descriptive study sought to fill this void via a manifest content approach to purposively select a sample of Section 1983 cases decided by U.S. District Courts over a 16-year period (2001-2016) to determine: (1) if significant liability was generated by reserve officers, (2) the main basis for …

Bepress & Ssrn Pilot Presentation, Carol A. Watson, Thomas J. Striepe

Presentations

A panel discussion announcing and sharing information about the joint pilot project exploring the integration between bepress and SSRN platforms launched in March 2018.

Rethinking Crime, Community, & Justice: A Symposium For Practitioners And Volunteers, Mary Louise Noce, Philippa Tomczak, Garry Glowacki, Rai Reece, Kaitlyn Quinn, Abigail Salole, Wali Shah

Crime Symposium 2018

On June 25, 2018 a symposium hosted by Sheridan College in Brampton, Ontario focused on the role of crime, community and justice with an emphasis on the role of the voluntary sector. 80 people were in attendance, including criminal justice practitioners, scholars, voluntary sector practitioners, faith groups and students. Financial support for the event from Sheridan’s Scholarship, Research & Creative Activities fund.

Opening remarks were provided by Dr. Mary Louise Noce, Associate Dean of the School of Community Studies. The keynote lecture was delivered by Dr. Philippa Tomczak, on the sociology of the Penal Voluntary Sector. Delegates from academia and …

Battling Fake News And Developing Digital Literacy Skills In The Legal Profession, Carol A. Watson, Caroline Osborne, Kris Niedringhaus

Presentations

Alternative facts? Truthiness? Post Truth? Hardly a day passes without someone making a reference to fake news. But why should lawyers care and what can information technology professionals and the legal academy do about it?
In order to fulfil a lawyer's duty of technology competency, digital information literacy is essential. Legal professionals must be able to locate, evaluate and use online information effectively. Evaluation of the reliability of digital information is a complex skill that must be mastered for the successful practice of law.
This program will discuss digital information literacy in the context of fake news. The session will …

Diversity Attorney Pipeline Program - Legal Research, Anne Hudson, Heather Hummons

College of Law Faculty

Living your best (Research) Life: How to Quickly and Efficiently Perform Legal Research. A Bootcamp for scholars from law schools across the country.

W&L Law Library Annual Report 2017-2018, The Law Library At Washington And Lee University School Of Law

Law Library Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Chinese And American Forum On Legal Information And Law Libraries: Highlights From Hangzhou, Ning Han, Evelyn Ma, Wei Luo

Ning Han

The Fifth Biennial Conference of the Chinese and American Forum on Legal Information and Law Libraries (CAFLL) was held in Hangzhou, China, June 1-2, 2017. More than sixty law school deans, law librarians, and law professors from more than fifty law schools in China attended the conference. Overseas attendees included more than twenty-five law librarians and library directors from Germany, Canada, as well as the presidents of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and International Association of Law Libraries (IALL).

Acknowledgments, Howard S. Carrier

International Journal on Responsibility

Serious work to bring the International Journal on Responsibility to life commenced during the summer of 2015. In the intervening period between conceptualization and publication, many organizations and individuals within James Madison University and the wider community have contributed enormously to bringing the journal to fruition.

Who Is Responsible For Ethical Legal Education, For What And To Whom? Case Of Kosovo, Sabiha Shala, Gjylbehare Muharti

International Journal on Responsibility

Legal education continues to be one of the most demanded areas of study from the younger generation in Kosovo. As result, the number of law graduates is quite high. On the other hand, the rule of law sector is quite fragile, judges and lawyers are perceived by parts of the society to be ethically dysfunctional. The trust in judicial institutions is quite low. The debate which is going on now is whose main responsibility for such a situation that is. Is the duty of the higher education institutions providing legal education, or is it a responsibility of educational institutions at …

Resolving The Paradox Of Holding People Responsible, Hal Pepinsky

International Journal on Responsibility

Regardless of justification, it is commonplace throughout the U.S. criminal justice system as in everyday life to teach our offenders and children alike that wrong actions “have consequences,” namely, those authority figures promise to impose upon them. We do so in the name of holding people responsible for their actions, or in legal parlance in civil law, holding them accountable or liable. I noticed that in Norwegian, responsibility, accountability and liability translate into one word, ansvar, which I have translated from Germanic to Latin roots as “responsiveness.” In practice, the state of being responsive to others with whom one conflicts …

Political Flip-Flopping, Political Responsibility, Current Governance, And The Disenfranchised, T.Y. Okosun

International Journal on Responsibility

No abstract provided.

What Does Responsibility Mean To Me?, Arun Gandhi

International Journal on Responsibility

No abstract provided.

Who Is Responsible To Do What For Whom? A Letter From The Editor-In-Chief, Terry Beitzel

International Journal on Responsibility

No abstract provided.

Fake News, Post-Truth & Information Literacy, Carol A. Watson, Caroline Osborne, Kristina L. Niedringhaus

Presentations

What is fake news? How did it arise? Why does recognizing fake news matter? How do we create information literate consumers in the legal community? This program will discuss the intersection of fake news and information literacy theory. We’ll provide an overview of the rise and proliferation of fake news including highlights of historical instances; a discussion of the impact of failing to detect fake news; and strategies for creating successful information literacy programming.

Law Library Blog (April 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Hand Annotation And Reliability: Corpus Linguistic Approaches To Teaching And Studying Writing, Brian Larson

Brian Larson