Using attention methods to predict judicial outcomes

Legal Judgment Prediction is one of the most acclaimed fields for the combined area of NLP, AI, and Law. By legal prediction we mean an intelligent systems capable to predict specific judicial characteristics, such as judicial outcome, a judicial class, predict an specific case. In this research, we have used AI classifiers to predict judicial outcomes in the Brazilian legal system. For this purpose, we developed a text crawler to extract data from the official Brazilian electronic legal systems. These texts formed a dataset of second-degree murder and active corruption cases. We applied different classifiers, such as Support Vector Machines and Neural Networks, to predict judicial outcomes by analyzing textual features from the dataset. Our research showed that Regression Trees, Gated Recurring Units and Hierarchical Attention Networks presented higher metrics for different subsets. As a final goal, we explored the weights of one of the algorithms, the Hierarchical Attention Networks, to find a sample of the most important words used to absolve or convict defendants

The Rise of Finance: Cultural Production and Politics in Mexico and Brazil after 1982.

The Rise of Finance: Cultural Production and Politics in Mexico and Brazil after 1982 examines the impact of the rise of finance, or the turn from production-based forms of accumulation to financial ones, on cultural production, social life, and subjectivity in Mexico and Brazil in the period from the 1982 debt crisis to the present. The first two chapters of this dissertation examine how cultural production reacts in the aftermath of the 1982 debt crisis and the process of state and capital restructuring which follows. In the opening chapter, I trace how Jorge Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor, in the face of financial indeterminacy, reconstitutes the racialized imaginary of the national popular, turning away from defining race via biology or culture, by specifying an “ontological” or moral division between good or bad subjects. The second chapter examines the same time period in Brazil and argues that the specificity of the post-82 period was not that of crisis (as in the Mexican case) but one of hyperinflation. As a result, the recomposition of the national popular form of social control which cultural production participates in takes a different form: again as a turn away from race thought as biology or culture but which is replaced in the Brazilian case by a spatial division between the formal and informal city. The chapters in part 2 of the dissertation argue that the post-2001 moment is marked by, in Brazil, what I term, “failed forms of financial corporativism,” or the attempted use of finance in the form of personal credit to bind subjects to the nation, and, in Mexico, a turn of the economy not to personal credit, but rather to “circulation” more generally (i.e., a turn away from the sphere of production into drug logistics, finance, and remittances) in which the state is unable to produce either processes of subjectivization or meaningful collectivities. Finally, in the conclusion, I examine what the twin conditions of increasing surplus capital and surplus population mean for our thinking of politics in Latin America.PHDRomance Languages and Literatures: SpanishUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120910/1/bwhiten_1.pd

Interactions Between Oil and Environmental Policy in Ecuador

Global public policy in 2023 is dominated by two interrelated challenges: the climate crisis and the clean energy transition. Ecuador, rich in both oil and biodiversity, represents a case study of the convergence of two apparently divergent economic development agendas: oil production and biodiversity conservation. Both are central to national policy objectives. Like other Latin American nations, Ecuador’s fiscal solvency is determined by natural resource prices. Policy-making and legislation relating to oil, Ecuador’s number one export, have historically been state priorities for maximizing economic benefits. However, Ecuador also hosts important biodiversity, which has led the country to sign environment-related conventions towards conservation and fighting climate change. Ecuador’s environmental efforts in recent decades have become a cornerstone of its diplomatic presence internationally. This study examines the interaction of oil and environmental policy in Ecuador. We analyze primary legislation and interview data, beginning with the most recent decrees on oil extraction and environment enacted in the first months of President Guillermo Lasso’s tenure. We describe the interactions, in the form of contradictions, affinities and partnerships, of oil and conservation efforts and the implications of the simultaneous prioritization for conservation and climate change goals. We draw upon these interactions in Yasuní National Park, where the financial scheme of conservation is determined by a tense dependency on oil rents and corporate participation. We argue that oil-based economic priorities overrule conservation goals. Consequently, oil extraction in territories of biocultural significance remain legitimated by the national government, due to the reliance on oil for funding land conservation and national parks. We conclude by considering Ecuador’s global position in conservation and climate-related efforts, and advance multi-scalar, inter-sectoral policy ideas for overcoming policy contradictions

Extração de Informações Baseada em Ontologia: Oportunidades e Desafios

Os sistemas de extração de informação baseada em ontologia (OBIE) permitem a ex-tração automática de conceitos em textos de linguagem natural em diversos domí-nios da sociedade. Muitas Abordagens de OBIE têm surgido propondo múltiplas va-riantes para os métodos de extração. Por isso, este trabalho apresenta um mapea-mento sistemático sobre as abordagens de OBIE recentes. Propomos um processo genérico que leva em conta o povoamento de ontologias e identificamos oportunida-de e desafios para a área de OBIE, entre eles, questões sobre linguagem e tradução, desempenho da arquitetura OBIE e qualidade da ontologia

Corporate legal personhood and capital fetishism: a theoretical analysis triggered by the Mariana mining disaster

This work uses the Mariana mining disaster (2015) as a trigger case to analyze how corporations are legally perceived in the context of disasters, specifically, tailings dam failures. The legal personality of corporations carries the mystery of being similar to a natural person judicially at the same time that are completely different from a human person when analyzed outside of the legal realm. Under that puzzle, the corporate legal personality nature was analyzed before the hegemonic theories of Brazilian legal scholars, revealing their insufficiencies to approach the Mariana Mining Disaster. Subsequently, an alternative approach is assessed through the studies of Evguieni Pashukanis and some recent authors that endorse his main ideas. Pashukanis reveals potentialities and limits that led to a proper elaboration of the corporate legal personhood concept and its internal dynamics in two steps. Firstly, revisiting the capital fetishism and the valueform theories, which led to a better understanding of the most developed and fetishized forms of capital, the interest bearing capital, as well as the contradictory developments between the capital and productive circuits. Secondly, revisiting the historic construction of the corporate form and its legal features in both USA and United Kingdom, in order to perceive the ascension of the corporate legal personality concept. Finally, some the corporate legal personhood concept characteristics and dynamics are proposed

Popular Will and International Law: The Expansion of Capitalism, the Question of Legitimate Authority, and the Universalisation of the Nation-State

The idea of 'popular will', or a people's ability to freely choose its preferred mode of political authority over any outside objection, forms the basis for domestic au-thority under international law. Such an outcome is the conclusion of consistently adhering to international law's presumptions of sovereign equality and noninter-vention most iconically encapsulated in the Charter of the United Nations. How-ever, while popular will theoretically allows the people of a sovereign state to pur-sue any governmental system, applying a methodology I deem 'world-historical context' reveals the limits of what can be substantively attained. Formed as an interdisciplinary synthesis of critical international legal history and the historical sociology of international relations, my analysis reveals how the globalization of popular will, and its vesting of sovereignty in the abstraction of a territory's underlying political community as opposed to the person of a dynastic monarch, is inseparable from the expansion of capitalism. On this basis, the mate-rial success of achieving popular will depends on the degree to which it facilitates global capitalism. The construction of this arrangement places radical political leaders and movements in a dilemma whereby claiming popular will is the only means of gaining international legal recognition, yet doing so comes at the expense of pursuing experimental alternatives to capitalist social relations. In this situation, 'effective control' has emerged as the default 'non-ideological' standard for externally evaluating international legal standing when competing domestic factions are claiming sovereign authority and, therefore, the representa-tion of popular will. In working from this premise that de facto 'effective control' is generally sufficient evidence of 'popular will', I historicize this framework as first appearing as a natural law counterfactual in Emer de Vattel's 1758 treatise The Law of Nations. Given the contradictions that emerged with capitalism and the crises of legitimate authority it produced in the late eighteenth and early nine-teenth centuries, the world proved highly receptive to Vattel's framework. This manifested, in compounding measures, through the American Revolution, French Revolution, and formation of the modern European states-system, and the inde-pendence of Latin American states. While these formative eruptions of popular will were subject to a century of limitation and qualification through various legal regimes of colonialism and exclusion, the idea of a global legal order of absolute sovereigns representing popular will returned with the end of the Second World War and rise of the UN system. Yet, despite this achievement of a 'world of pop-ular will', the marginalization of alternative political economic models persists. At-tempt to identify the place of international law when developing greater projects of popular emancipation cannot, therefore, ignore the 'world-historical context' presented by this thesis

SEE

"Vision traditionally occupies the height of the sensorial hierarchy. The sense of clarity and purity conveyed by vision, allows it to be explicitly associated with truth and knowledge. The law has always relied on vision and representation, from eye-witnesses to photography, to imagery and emblems. The law and its normative gaze can be understood as that which decrees what is permitted to be and become visible and what is not. Indeed, even if law’s perspectival view is bound to be betrayed by the realities of perception, it is nonetheless productive of real effects on the world. This first title in the interdisciplinary series ‘Law and the Senses’ asks how we can develop new theoretical approaches to law and seeing that go beyond a simple critique of the legal pretension to truth. This volume aims to understand how law might see and unsee, and how in its turn is seen and unseen. It explores devices and practices of visibility, the evolution of iconology and iconography, and the relation between the gaze of the law and the blindness of justice. The contributions, all radically interdisciplinary, are drawn from photography, legal theory, philosophy, and poetry.

Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema

This doctoral work scrutinizes recent popular Indian cinemas (largely Hindi cinema) in the light of three epochal changes in the sub-continental situation since the early nineties: the opening out of the economy, the political rise of the Hindu right, and the inauguration of a new transnational electronic media universe. It is argued here that contemporary Indian films should not be read in terms of a continuing, agonistic conflict between polarities like 'modern' selves and 'traditional' moorings. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how, in popular Indian films of our times, an agrarian paternalistic ideology of Brahminism, or its founding myths can actually enter into assemblages of cinematic spectacle and affect with metropolitan lifestyles, managerial codas of the 'free market', individualism, consumer desire, and neo-liberal imperatives of polity and government. This involves a social transmission of 'cinema effects' across the larger media space, and symbiotic exchanges between long standing epic-mythological attributes of Indian popular cinema and visual idioms of MTV, consumer advertising, the travel film, gadgetry, and images of technology. A discussion of a new age 'cinematic' in the present Indian context thus has to be informed by a general theory of contemporary planetary 'informatics.' The latter however is not a superstructural reflection of economic transformations; it is part of an overall capitalistic production of social life that is happening on a global scale in our times. This dissertation attempts to make two important contributions to the field: it opens out the Eurocentric domain of traditional film studies and suggests ways in which studies of Indian films can enrich a global understanding of the cinematic; it also offers a possible explanation as to how, in the present age, a neo-Hindu patriarchal notion of Dharma (duty, religion) can actually bolster, instead of impeding, a techno-managerial-financial schema of globalization in India

Hear: Law and the Senses

Hearing is an intricate but delicate modality of sensory perception, continuously enfolded in the surroundings in which it takes place. While passive in its disposition, it is integral to the movement and fluctuations of one’s environment. Always attuned to the present and immersed in the murmur of its background, hearing remains a situated perception but fundamentally overarching and extended into the open. It is an immanent modality of being in and with the world. It is also the ultimate juridical act, a sense-making activity that adjudicates and informs the spatio-temporal acoustics of law and justice. This collection gathers multidisciplinary contributions on the relationship between law and hearing, the human vocalisations and non-human echolocations, the spatial and temporal conditions in which hearing takes place, as well as the forms of order and control that listening entails. Contributors explore, challenge and expand the structural and sensorial qualities of law, and recognise how hearing directs us to perceiving and understanding the intrinsic acoustic sphere of simultaneous relations, which challenge and break the normative distinctions that law informs and maintains. In exploring the ambiguous, indefinable and unembodied nature of hearing, as well as its objects – sound and silence – this volume approaches it as both an ontological and epistemological device to think with and about law