Citizen Science for Citizen Access to Law

This papers sits at the intersection of citizen access to law, legal informatics and plain language. The paper reports the results of a joint project of the Cornell University Legal Information Institute and the Australian National University which collected thousands of crowdsourced assessments of the readability of law through the Cornell LII site. The aim of the project is to enhance accuracy in the prediction of the readability of legal sentences. The study requested readers on legislative pages of the LII site to rate passages from the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations and other texts for readability and other characteristics. The research provides insight into who uses legal rules and how they do so. The study enables conclusions to be drawn as to the current readability of law and spread of readability among legal rules. The research is intended to enable the creation of a dataset of legal rules labelled by human judges as to readability. Such a dataset, in combination with machine learning, will assist in identifying factors in legal language which impede readability and access for citizens. As far as we are aware, this research is the largest ever study of readability and usability of legal language and the first research which has applied crowdsourcing to such an investigation. The research is an example of the possibilities open for enhancing access to law through engagement of end users in the online legal publishing environment for enhancement of legal accessibility and through collaboration between legal publishers and researchers

Droits d\u27Urgence: Access of Citizens to Legal Information in France

The purpose of this Article is to give a brief overview of citizen access to justice and legal information in France, both before and after the implementation of the reform. This Article will primarily focus on the work of non-governmental organizations in this field, especially the work of Droits d\u27Urgence, the NGO of which I am a founder and President. Droits d\u27Urgence deals primarily with access to legal information for the most marginalized sectors of the population. It is a humanitarian organization of legal professionals involved in the promotion of rights for those suffering from exclusion

SALT Newsletter, Vol. 1977, No. 4A

From the President, at 1. Supreme Court Restriction of Citizen Access to Federal Court, at 1. What Should the Standards of Professional Conduct Be?, at 1

Citizen Access to Corporatized Power Services in Manipur, Northeastern India

The state of Manipur in the northeastern region of India, along with a fragmented state-society relationship also suffers from the twin problems of limited public infrastructure and poor state capability to deliver public services. Power services in Manipur suffered from the dual problem of weak power generation and limited state capability to ensure citizens’ access to power services. Following the policy recommendations of the Government of India and the Electricity Act of 2003, to improve the delivery of power services the government of Manipur unbundled the electricity department into two entities Manipur State Power Corporation Limited (MSPCL) and Manipur State Power Distribution Corporatization Limited (MSPDCL) in 2014. Corporatization separated the functions of allocation and distribution of power services and transformed the power sector from a bureaucratic organization into an arms-length, contract-based managerial unit, to function as a corporate entity. Corporatization along with the use of pre-paid meters, user-friendly services like easy ways of recharging the pre-paid meters, and call center services have profoundly improved the state’s capability to deliver power services. This paper is based on a survey amongst 200 households through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires in 2019-2020 in the urban areas of the two valley districts of Imphal West and Bishnupur in India. The survey focused on the capability of the state institutions to deliver power services, citizens’ responses to the reforms in the delivery of power services, and the sustainability of these reforms in building state capability. The response from the survey revealed that corporatization has improved citizens’ access to power services, however, the lack of additional accountability checks and performance-based management would, in the long run, affect MSPDCL’s delivery of power services, and Manipur’s corporatization model. The research, however, was undertaken in the pre-Covid period, hence citizens’ access to services in the post-Covid world needs to be re-examined in future research. Keywords:  Citizens, Corporatization, Accountability, Governanc

Information disclosure and environmental rights: the Aarhus Convention

Access to information is the first "pillar" of the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (1998). This article examines how the information disclosure obligations on states within the Aarhus Convention express a particular blend of human environmental rights, conjoining procedural entitlements (and duties) with a substantive right to an environment adequate to human health and well-being: "Aarhus environmental rights" have been lauded for increasing citizen access to environmental information, helping to secure more transparent and accountable regulatory processes. However, the information rights are rendered inconsistent in practice by three properties: 1) the discretion accorded to Convention Parties in interpreting Aarhus rights; 2) the exclusion of private entities from mandatory information disclosure duties; and 3) the indeterminate coupling of procedural and substantive rights. These tensions reflect a structural imbalance in the articulation of Aarhus rights between social welfare and market liberal perspectives

Freedom of Information Act Performance, 2012: Agencies Are Processing More Requests but Redacting More Often

A building block of American democracy is the idea that citizens have a right to information about how their government works and what it does in their name. However, citizen access to public information was only established by law in 1966 with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The law has since been strengthened and improved over the years, and FOIA currently requires federal agencies to formally respond to requests for information within 20 working days or potentially face a lawsuit. While there are exemptions that agencies can use to avoid the disclosure of sensitive information or information that violates privacy rights, agencies processed over half a million FOIA requests in 2012. In about 41 percent of these cases, the information requested was released "in full" with no parts "redacted" -- i.e., clean, complete documents with no blacked-out parts were provided to the person who requested the information. How does this compare to past years and past administrations? How well has President Obama met his goal of being the most transparent administration in history with regard to access to public information? This report examines the processing of FOIA requests from 25 major federal agencies in 2012 and reviews the processing of FOIA requests by agencies since 1998

The End of the Third Wave and the Global Future of Democracy. IHS Political Science Series No. 45, July 1997

The “Third Wave” of global democratization, which began in 1974, now appears to be drawing to a close. While the number of “electoral democracies” has tripled since 1974, the rate of increase has slowed every year since 1991 (when the number jumped by almost 20 percent) and is now near zero. Moreover, if we examine the more demanding standard of “liberal democracy” – in which there is substantial individual and associational freedom, civic pluralism, civi lian supremacy over the military, a secure rule of law, and “horizontal accountability” of office-holders to one another – we observe today the same proportion of liberal democracies in the world as existed in 1991. If a “third reverse wave” of democratic erosion or breakdowns is to be avoided, the new democracies of the third wave will need to become consolidated. Elites and citizens of every major party, interest, and ethnicity must accept the legitimacy of democracy and of the specific constitutional rules and practices in place in their country. In many new democracies, this requires a sweeping agenda of institutional reform to widen citizen access to power, control corruption, and improve the depth and quality of democracy. Elsewhere – as in China and Indonesia – rapid economic development and the gradual emergence of stronger, more autonomous civil associations and legal and representative institutions may be laying the foundations for a “fourth wave” of democratization at some point in the early twenty-first century