Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles (respectively, κ=0.65 and κ=0.95 for inter- and intra-annotator agreement). We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall κ of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard

Standards in Disruptive Innovation: Assessment Method and Application to Cloud Computing

Die Dissertation schlägt ein konzeptionelles Informationsmodell und eine Methode zur Bewertung von Technologie-Standards im Kontext von Disruptiven Innovationen vor. Das konzeptionelle Informationsmodell stellt die Grundlage zur Strukturierung relevanter Informationen dar. Die Methode definiert ein Prozessmodell, das die Instanziierung des Informationsmodells für verschiedenen Domänen beschreibt und Stakeholder bei der Klassifikation und Evaluation von Technologie-Standards unterstützt

Lobbying of commercial diplomats: institutional setting as a determining factor

The aim of this research is to contribute to the understanding of how commercial diplomats lobby for public procurement contracts. The institutional environment has ramifications for the manner of lobbying and for the practice of commercial diplomacy. This research brings together these streams of literature, and a conceptual model is developed. By means of an in-depth, single-case study, investigating the lobbying activities of EU diplomats in Indonesia, the study aimed to illustrate the model and draw the list of lobbying activities applicable for commercial diplomats. The findings reveal that in a weak institutional development environment, the diplomats focus on informational lobbying and rely heavily on their networks. If the decision-making powers are decentralized, the diplomats target more decision-makers. If diplomats do not have an access to decision-makers then ‘voice’ lobbying is applied. If the decision-makers are not elected, the diplomats do not engage in constituency-building lobbying. The findings illustrate the plausibility of the introduced conceptual model. They also suggest that domestic factors, such as interest in the host country, priority status of the host country and historical bilateral ties can positively influence the lobbying activities of the diplomats as well

Integrated Legal Information Retrieval; new developments and educational challenges

The amount of legal information, available digitally, has increased gradually in the past three decades. We are now approaching a situation in which practically all legal information a lawyer needs on a daily basis can be obtained from digital sources. At the same time, powerful retrieval systems capable of integrating these sources and performing more effective search operations have become available. In this paper, new possibilities are outlined that have emerged now that such a large proportion of legal resources have been combined in unified collections. Also, the need to incorporate more advanced ‘legal information skills’ in the legal curriculum is discussed. These skills are required to ensure that all newly educated lawyers will be able to use digital legal information optimally, now and in the future