Digital humanities and the state of legal history: A text mining perspective

For reasons of curiosity, we perused the two recent Oxford handbooks on legal history looking for discussions of digital methods in legal history. One of the fundamental decisions to be made when organizing such a handbook is defining which methodological approaches deserve an article of their own and which ones are to be understood rather as cross-cutting themes to be discussed in the context of many articles dedicated to other things. In the case of digital methods in legal history, this decision seems to have been a tough one – at one point, you can find a curious reference to a »chapter on ›Legal History and Digital Humanities‹« (OHBLH 354), but in the final publication there is no such text. However, discussing digital methods in the context of other subjects has, in our opinion, the disadvantage that more systematic, methodological arguments cannot really be developed. Put more concretely, the most ›substantial‹ contributions regarding digital methods are, for whatever reason, those on »The Intellectual History of Law« by Assaf Likhovski, on »Taking the Long View« by Paul D. Halliday, on »Quantitative Legal History« by Daniel Klerman, and on »Indian Law« by Mitra Sharafi, all of which are in the Oxford Handbook on Legal History. (Equally surprising, there is no mention of digital methods at all in Angela Fernandez’s »Legal History as The History of Legal Texts«.) However, even these articles do not really ›discuss‹ digital methods, rather they merely refer to them (and to some projects) as contributions of sorts to their respective fields of interest. Thus, if you are looking for digital methods in those handbooks, you can hardly find more than some namedropping passages where things like »digital mapping […], network analysis […], text analysis« (OHBLH 845f.) are mentioned, together with references to example projects where they have been employed but without any explanation as to: – why these methods are mentioned and not others, – what they are doing, to which end and under what circumstances, – what, possibly transformative, impact these methods have on the (respective sub-) field of legal history, and – what a scholar considering to apply these methods should be aware of. While the space for this is limited, the present Forum contribution tries to mitigate the scarcity of such discussions by presenting and discussing a few textual analyses that make use – for demonstration purposes – of digital methods. Some other methods of analysis, network analysis, and geo-mapping (among others), cannot be covered here, but we provide a link to an online bibliography where you can find them applied to legal history or a related domain, and discussed critically. A general discussion of digital perspectives beyond concrete methods of analysis concludes this contribution.Fil: Küsters, Anselm. Max-planck-institut Für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte.; AlemaniaFil: Volkind, Maria Laura. Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Wagner, Andreas. Max-planck-institut Für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte.; Alemani

Aktuelle Entwicklungen im Kontext von Online-Wahlen und digitalen Abstimmungen

Seit Beginn der Pandemie stehen viele Institutionen (inkl. Vereinen, Unternehmen und Behörden) vor der Frage, wie sie ihre Wahlen und geheimen Abstimmungen organisieren sollen – ohne die Gesundheit der Wähler*innen und Wahlhelfer*innen zu gefährden. Einige Wahlverantwortliche haben sich für die Durchführung von Online-Wahlen bzw. digitalen Abstimmungen entschieden. Erfahrungen anderer Wahlverantwortlicher, die bereits vor der Pandemie online gewählt haben, ab es in Deutschland kaum. Vor der Pandemie wurde das Thema Online-Wahlen in Deutschland – bedingt durch das sogenannte Wahlgeräte-Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgerichts (2009) – kaum diskutiert. Nach über einem Jahr Pandemie sieht die Lage anders aus: Inzwischen fanden einige Wahlen und Abstimmungen online statt. Allerdings entsprechen die dazu eingesetzten Systeme häufig nicht dem Stand der Forschung. Für zukünftige Nutzungen von Online-Wahlen und digitalen Abstimmungen (insbesondere auch nach der Pandemie) ist es daher wichtig, dass Wahlverantwortliche, Kandidat*innen und Wähler*innen verstehen, welches Risiko die bisher eingesetzten Systeme mit sich bringen und wie einzelne Entwicklungen im Kontext von Online-Wahlen und digitalen Abstimmungen einzuordnen sind. Nur so können informierte Entscheidungen im Hinblick auf die einzusetzenden Ansätze getroffen und die Demokratie auch in Zukunft geschützt werden

Efficacy and Toxicity of Different Chemotherapy Protocols for Concurrent Chemoradiation in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer—A Secondary Analysis of the PET Plan Trial

(1) Background: The optimal chemotherapy (CHT) regimen for concurrent chemoradiation (cCRT) is not well defined. In this secondary analysis of the international randomized PET-Plan trial, we evaluate the efficacy of different CHT. (2) Methods: Patients with inoperable NSCLC were randomized at a 1:1 ratio regarding the target volume definition and received isotoxically dose-escalated cCRT using cisplatin 80 mg/m2 (day 1, 22) and vinorelbin 15 mg/m2 (day 1, 8, 22, 29) (P1) or cisplatin 20 mg/m2 (day 1–5, 29–33) and vinorelbin 12.5 mg/m2 (day 1, 8, 15, 29, 36, 43) (P2) or carboplatin AUC1 (day 1–5, 29–33) and vinorelbin 12.5 mg/m2 (day 1, 8, 15, 29, 36, 43) (P3) or other CHT at the treating physician’s discretion. (3) Results: Between 05/2009 and 11/2016, 205 patients were randomized and 172 included in the per-protocol analysis. Patients treated in P1 or P2 had a better overall survival (OS) compared to P3 (p = 0.015, p = 0.01, respectively). Patients treated with carboplatin had a worse OS compared to cisplatin (HR 1.78, p = 0.03), but the difference did not remain significant after adjusting for age, ECOG, cardiac function creatinine and completeness of CHT. (4) Conclusions: Carboplatin doublets show no significant difference compared to cisplatin, after adjusting for possibly relevant factors, probably due to existing selection bias

Switch observability for homogeneous switched DAEs

We introduce the notions of switching time observability and switch observability for homogeneous switched differential-algebraic equations (DAEs). In contrast to mode detection, they do not require observability of the individual modes and are thus more suitable for fault detection and identification. Based on results in (Küsters and Trenn, 2017) for switched ordinary differential equations (ODEs), we characterize these notions for homogeneous switched DAEs and propose an observer for switch observable systems

A Game-Based Definition of Coercion-Resistance and its Applications

Coercion-resistance is one of the most important and intricate security requirements for voting protocols. Several definitions of coercion-resistance have been proposed in the literature, both in cryptographic settings and more abstract, symbolic models. However, unlike symbolic approaches, only very few voting protocols have been rigorously analyzed within the cryptographic setting. A major obstacle is that existing cryptographic definitions of coercion-resistance tend to be complex and limited in scope: They are often tailored to specific classes of protocols or are too demanding. In this paper, we therefore present a simple and intuitive cryptographic definition of coercion-resistance, in the style of game-based definitions. This definition allows to precisely measure the level of coercion-resistance a protocol provides. As the main technical contribution of this paper, we apply our definition to two voting systems, namely, the Bingo voting system and ThreeBallot. The results we obtain are out of the scope of existing approaches. We show that the Bingo voting system provides the same level of coercion-resistance as an ideal voting system. We also precisely measure the degradation of coercion-resistance of ThreeBallot in case the so-called short ballot assumption is not met and show that the level of coercion-resistance ThreeBallot provides is significantly lower than that of an ideal system, even in case of short ballots.