Learning to Predict Charges for Criminal Cases with Legal Basis

The charge prediction task is to determine appropriate charges for a given case, which is helpful for legal assistant systems where the user input is fact description. We argue that relevant law articles play an important role in this task, and therefore propose an attention-based neural network method to jointly model the charge prediction task and the relevant article extraction task in a unified framework. The experimental results show that, besides providing legal basis, the relevant articles can also clearly improve the charge prediction results, and our full model can effectively predict appropriate charges for cases with different expression styles.Comment: 10 pages, accepted by EMNLP 201

Pick the Lowest Hanging Fruit: Hate Crime Law and the Acknowledgment of Racial Violence

The U.S. has had remedies aimed at racial violence since the Ku Klux Klan Act was passed in the 1870s. Hate crime law, which is more than thirty years old, is the most recent incarnation. The passage of hate crime law, first at the federal level and later by the states, has done very little to slow the rising tide of bigotry. After a brief discussion of state and federal hate crime law, this Article will critically examine the country’s approach to hate crime. The article will then discuss one of the most prevalent forms of hate crime—bias-motivated violence that targets individuals in their homes. The article will conclude with a discussion of the approach taken by the Justice Department in the Ahmad Arbery case as a potentially positive solution for the handling of hate crime cases

AIDA: Legal Judgment Predictions for Non-Professional Fact Descriptions via Partial-and-Imbalanced Domain Adaptation

In this paper, we study the problem of legal domain adaptation problem from an imbalanced source domain to a partial target domain. The task aims to improve legal judgment predictions for non-professional fact descriptions. We formulate this task as a partial-and-imbalanced domain adaptation problem. Though deep domain adaptation has achieved cutting-edge performance in many unsupervised domain adaptation tasks. However, due to the negative transfer of samples in non-shared classes, it is hard for current domain adaptation model to solve the partial-and-imbalanced transfer problem. In this work, we explore large-scale non-shared but related classes data in the source domain with a hierarchy weighting adaptation to tackle this limitation. We propose to embed a novel pArtial Imbalanced Domain Adaptation technique (AIDA) in the deep learning model, which can jointly borrow sibling knowledge from non-shared classes to shared classes in the source domain and further transfer the shared classes knowledge from the source domain to the target domain. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.Comment: 13 pages, 15 figure

Battery and Abuse in the Elderly: A Forensic Analysis

Elder abuse is a recognized social problem in the United States. First labeled as granny battering and originally studied under the umbrella of family violence, maltreatment of the elderly has received more funding and research in recent years. Multiple aspects of elder abuse have been examined in the literature including measures for detection, assessment, and documentation. Although studies have examined the circumstances surrounding abuse as well as theories of causation and characteristics of the abuser and the abused, studies of the relationship between the abuser and the abused are less well documented. The purpose of this research was to examine the abuser relationship, family or non-family, and types of abuse (physical, financial, sexual) in the elderly through evaluation of prosecuted cases of elder abuse in order to identify relationships which may inform nursing science in early prevention and intervention strategies in a vulnerable elderly population. Specifically, this research aimed to answer the question What is the relationship between type of abuser (family, non-family) and type of abuse in cases prosecuted through the San Diego District Attorney\u27s Office? Statistical analysis demonstrated significance in abuser-abused relationship, type of abuse, and demographic age/gender predictors of financial and physical abuse. No statistical significance was found for sexual abuse. This study informs future nursing research in health outcomes for vulnerable elders, nursing curriculum, and health policy in an aging population

Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major U.S. Cities

The underground commercial sex economy (UCSE) generates millions of dollars annually, yet investigation and data collection remain under resourced. Our study aimed to unveil the scale of the UCSE in eight major US cities. Across cities, the UCSE's worth was estimated between $39.9 and$290 million in 2007, but decreased since 2003 in all but two cities. Interviews with pimps, traffickers, sex workers, child pornographers, and law enforcement revealed the dynamics central to the underground commercial sex trade -- and shaped the policy suggestions to combat it

Improving legal information retrieval by online Legal Tools database

With the emergence of Internet various institutions started making available important legal materials in centralized online databases. Depending on the previous classification of data, available resources, degree of disclosure, each organization adopts its own way to present materials online. Oftentimes institutions providing similar data organize it in different ways (different titles, categories, search criteria, search engines, websites etc.) Additionally, some may do it differently due to budget restrictions, profitability/non-profitability of the project, etc. As a result, a user needs to adjust to interface and retrieval mechanisms of each online database. In the present thesis I illustrate state of the art in retrieval of legal sources online from the user perspective in order to contribute to the development of recently made available Legal Tools database run under the auspices of the International Criminal Court. The features that immediately distinguish this database from other international criminal law libraries are: 1) The database incorporates legal acts and case law from different jurisdictions (both national and international) related to international crimes; 2) It allows analysis of certain issue across national and international jurisdictions in various languages enabling its users to distinguish and compare judicial practice and situations, unlike the majority of legal databases focusing on specific jurisdiction; 3) It is free to the public and is organized with the aim to reduce costs of the International Criminal Court by distributing work among several research institutions. I will describe interface of Legal Tools website, the retrieval of data, the presentation of results, the organization of documents and I will compare it with the manner materials are organized on other websites and online databases (legal libraries, human rights advocacy websites, etc.

Economic Espionage as Reality or Rhetoric: Equating Trade Secrecy with National Security

In the last few years, the Economic Espionage Act (EEA), a 1996 statute that criminalizes trade secrecy misappropriation, was amended twice, once to increase the penalties and once to expand the definition of trade secrets and the types of behaviors that are illegal. Recent developments also reveal a pattern of expansion in investigation, indictments, and convictions under the EEA as well as the devotion of large resources by the FBI and other agencies to warn private industry against the global threats of trade secret theft. At the international level, the United States government has been advocating enhanced levels of trade secrecy protection in new regional trade agreements This article asks about the effects these developments on innovation. The article examines the rhetoric the government is using to promote its trade secrecy agenda, uncovering that the argument for greater protection appears to derive at least some of its power from xenophobia, and most importantly, from a conflation of private economic interests with national security concerns, interjecting a new dimension to the moral component of innovation policy debates. Analyzing recent empirical research about innovation policy, we ask about the effects of these recent trends on university research and on private market innovation, including entrepreneurship, information flows and job mobility. We argue that, paradoxically, the effort to protect valuable information and retain the United States’ leadership position could disrupt information flows, interfere with collaborative efforts, and ultimately undermine the inventive capacity of American innovators. The article offers suggestions for reconciling legitimate concerns about national security with the balance intellectual property law traditionally seeks to strike between incentivizing innovation and ensuring the vibrancy of the creative environment. We conclude that a legal regime aimed at protecting incumbency is not one that can also optimally foster innovation

The Erosion of Rights: Declining Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Bush Administration

The erosion of civil rights across our nation over the past six years is the result of willful neglect and calculated design. The Bush administration continues to use the courts and the judicial appointment process to narrow civil rights protections and repeal remedies for legal redress while allowing the traditional tools of the executive branch for civil rights enforcement to wither and die. The resulting inequality of opportunity, deteriorating civil liberties, and rising religious and racial discrimination are sad commentaries on the priorities of the current administration