Toward Linking Heterogenous References in Czech Court Decisions to Content

In this paper we present initial results from our effort to automatically detect references in decisions of the courts in the Czech Republic and link these references to their content. We focus on references to case-law and legal literature. To deal with wide variety in how references are expressed we use a novel distributed approach to reference recognition. Instead of attempting to recognize the references as a whole we focus on their lower level constituents. We assembled a corpus of 350 decisions and annotated it with more than 50,000 annotations corresponding to different reference constituents. Here we present our first attempt to detect these constituents automaticall

Searching for a Reference: Using Automated Text Analysis to Study Judicial Compliance

The concept of judicial compliance has attracted plenty of attention in the last two decades. Yet, despite the growing scholarly interest, important research questions remain largely unresolved. This is partly due to the persistent use of unsystematic research, built on the cherry picking of cases. The content of only a few well-known judgments has been thoroughly examined, and the rest remains largely ignored by the legal scholarship. The aim of this article is to introduce a sketch of a new three-level approach for improving research on judicial compliance in a multi-level arena. We show how the use of automated text analysis in combination with more traditional legal methods might shed more light on the concept of judicial compliance and judicial dialogues. We explain the procedure of the automated collection of data and their coding and also point out the risks of using automated text analysis when studying judicial compliance. The approach is demonstrated on a single case study of the use of European Court of Human Rights rulings by Czech apex courts. This study assesses how often and in what way the domestic courts engage with the European Court of Human Rights case law

Legal Knowledge and Information Systems - JURIX 2017: The Thirtieth Annual Conference

The proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems – JURIX 2017. For three decades, the JURIX conferences have been held under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (www.jurix.nl). In the time, it has become a European conference in terms of the diverse venues throughout Europe and the nationalities of participants

Limits of the rule of law: Negotiating Afghan “traditional” law in the international civil trials in the Czech Republic

Drawing on ethnographic research of judicial cases in the Czech Republic which involve the law in migrants\u27 countries of origin, this Article outlines how multiple strategies handle encounters with the legal-cultural differences of Afghanistan in order to neutralize what may be called the “alterity” of law. The Article suggests that far from being analytical tools, concepts such as “context,” “culture,” and “customary” are strategically used by courts to neutralize unsettling aspects of foreign Afghan legalities. Further, it applies Leopold Pospíšil´s ethnological concept of legal authority as a vehicle for reinterpreting the contextual differentiation of Afghan “traditional” law as an alternative to the standard judicial approach. Lastly, this Article suggests that the legal-cultural differences in this and similar cases can be bridged by a new concept of legal sodality, which offers an anthropologization of legal authorities’ distinctive manner of imagining the law of the others

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Urban food strategies in Central and Eastern Europe: what's specific and what's at stake?

Integrating a larger set of instruments into Rural Development Programmes implied an increasing focus on monitoring and evaluation. Against the highly diversified experience with regard to implementation of policy instruments the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework has been set up by the EU Commission as a strategic and streamlined method of evaluating programmes’ impacts. Its indicator-based approach mainly reflects the concept of a linear, measure-based intervention logic that falls short of the true nature of RDP operation and impact capacity on rural changes. Besides the different phases of the policy process, i.e. policy design, delivery and evaluation, the regional context with its specific set of challenges and opportunities seems critical to the understanding and improvement of programme performance. In particular the role of local actors can hardly be grasped by quantitative indicators alone, but has to be addressed by assessing processes of social innovation. This shift in the evaluation focus underpins the need to take account of regional implementation specificities and processes of social innovation as decisive elements for programme performance.

Interpreting

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount cultural identity. The default mode of interpreting shows a desire for speed that suppresses differences requiring cultural mediation. It is theorized this imbalance stems from the invention and implementation of simultaneous interpreting within a highly charged historical moment that was steeped in trauma. Interpreting as a professional practice developed in keeping with technological capacities and historical contingencies accompanying processes of industrialization and modernity. The resulting expectations about what interpreting can and cannot achieve play out in microsocial group dynamics (as inequality) and macrosocial policy (legalized injustice). Interpreting invites an encounter with difference: foreignization is embedded within the experience of participating in simultaneous interpretation because interpreting disrupts the accustomed flow of consciousness, forcing participants to adapt (or resist adapting) to an alternate rhythm of turn-taking. This results in an unusual awareness of time. Discomforts associated with heightened time-consciousness open possibilities for deep learning and new kinds of relationships among people, ideas, and problem-setting. An analysis of the frustrations of users (interpretees) and practitioners (interpreters) suggests the need for other remedies than complete domestication. Reframing training for interpreters, and cultivating skillful and strategic participation by interpretees, could be leveraged systematically to improve social equality and reduce intercultural tensions through a balanced emphasis on sharing understanding and creating mutually-relevant meanings. This comparative cultural and critical discourse analysis enables an action research/action learning hypothesis aimed at intercultural social resilience: social control of diversity can be calibrated and contained through rituals of participation in special practices of simultaneously-interpreted communication

Allocation & Integration: Institutional Solutions to the European Union’s Refugee Crisis

This monograph analyzes refugee protection from a Law & Economics perspective. It attempts to answer the research question: how can social and economic forces be brought into equilibrium with the laws governing refugee protection? In order to answer this question several smaller, yet nonetheless important questions are tackled. These questions are divided into two domains: allocation and integration