Dear Readers,
With the five selected contributions of JURIX 2011 Conference in Vienna, Artificial Intelligence & Law is the focus of this issue. Special thanks are due to the JURIX Foundation for Legal Knowledge Systems and the publisher IOS Press for their kind permission of the re-print from the conference proceedings (Katie M. Atkinson (ed.), JURIX2011: The Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference, Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, IOS Press BV, Amsterdam).
AI & Law is concerned with methods of formalization in law and advanced informatics systems in law. A feature of the present research is the variety of topics of formalization, with argumentation, case-based reasoning and ontologies as main themes. Text extraction, text summarisation and text classification link AI & law with related research in information retrieval and e-discovery.
Matthias Grabmair, Kevin D. Ashley , Rebecca Hwa and Patricia M. Sweeney – Toward Extracting Information From Public Health Statutes using Text Classification and Machine Learning – describe preliminary results in extracting semantic information from public health legislative provisions.
Floris Bex, Trevor Bench-Capon and Bart Verhei – What Makes a Story Plausible? The Need for Precedents – are concerned with establishing coherence of facts of a case for what typically past examples are used. It is shown that factual stories can be properly formalised as precedents using case-based reasoning (here: CATO).
Kevin Ashley and Ilya Goldin – Toward AI-Enhanced Computer-Supported Peer Review in Legal Education – use Bayesian data analysis to model a computer-supported review process von students essays by students.
Henry Prakken and Giovanni Sartor – On Modelling Burdens and Standards of Proof in Structured Argumentation – present a formal model for argumentation with burdens and standards of proof.
Alexander Boer and Tom van Engers – Implementing Compliance Controls in Public Administration – present a monitoring and diagnosis component of a knowledge acquisition, design and simulation system for implementing compliance in public administration.
AI & Law has a high theoretical approach and is therefore considered as a field with little practical relevance. This may have been true in the past. The digitization and the Internet have created a platform for apps that will increasingly rely on the results of AI. In digital citizenship participation, ontologies and the Semantic Web will play an important role.
The digitization of society is creating new opportunities. Fritjof Haft und Ernst Lorenz – Digitale Bürgerbeteiligung in der «Offenen Gesellschaft» (Digital citizen participation in the «Open Society») – deal with the democratic options of the Internet as a means of direct democracy.
Privacy is with the topics of Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), cloud computing, e-voting and credit rating agencies another focus of this issue. Furthermore, two contributions deal with copyright: ACTA and used software. The legal issues of the use of personal devices in business are also handled.
Michael Geist – Canada-European Trade Deal At Risk Due to Controversal Copyright Rules –criticizes the secrecy of recent international negotiations in IP law. While ACTA seems to be history now after the rejection of the European Parliament, it appears that many of these provisions are to be included in the currently negotiated EU-Canada free-trade agreement.
Thomas Hoeren – Der EuGH und der Onlinevertrieb «gebrauchter» Software (The ECJ and the online sales of «used» software) – discusses the groundbreaking judgment C-128/11, UsedSoft, dated 3 July 2012.
Nicole Beranek Zanon – Bring your own device (BYOD) aus rechtlicher Sicht (Bring your own device (BYOD) from a legal perspective) – is dealing with legal questions of the business use of private equipment.
Rolf H. Weber –Can Data Protection be Improved through Privacy Impact Assessments?– assesses the self-regulatory measure of the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA).
Christian Tautschnig – Cloud Computing und das neue Datenschutzregime der EU (Cloud computing and the new data protection regime of the EU) – deals with the impact of the proposed EU data protection package of the European Commission on the cloud.
Denise Demirel und Maria Henning – Legal Analysis of Privacy Weaknesses in Poll-Site eVoting Systems – analyses the opposition of the secret ballot act and the need for transparency in the electoral system.
At last, Erich Schweighofer reviews the book by Orlan Lee about «Waiving Our Rights».The importance of a comprehensive data protection regime is well argued on the practice von credit rating agencies in the United States.
Having said this, we hope you enjoy reading this issue!
