The First International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law (RELAW 2008) will be held in Barcelona (Spain), September 9, 2008, in conjunction with the 16th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (submission deadline July 4, 2008.) Read More...

The 21st International JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems will be held in Florence, Italy, from 10-13 December 2008. The Call for Papers is now available (submission deadline Sept 1st).

The Second International Workshop on Supporting Search and Sensemaking for Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings (DESI II) will take place Wednesday, June 25, 2008, at University College London, in the United Kingdom. See the Call for Papers for further information.

Stanford Law School's Codex Center for Computers and Law is accepting applications for a Resident Fellowship for the 2008-09 academic year. Read More...

The Second International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2008) will take place June 10, 2008 at the Asahikawa Convention Bureau, in Hokkaido, Japan. See the Call for Papers for further information.

The twentieth Jurix conference will take place in Leiden, The Netherlands, December 12-15, 2007. Topics of the conference include legal ontologies, legal argumentation, multilingual legislative drafting, legal XML standards, online dispute resolution, etc. There will also be several workshops and tutorials, on modelling legal cases, multimedia ontologies, access to justice, legislative XML, and technology-enhanced dispute resolution. See the conference web site for information about how to register.

A new series of books on law, science and technology, in Spanish, was recently announced by Ramon López de Mántaras in Madrid (Residencia de Estudiantes) and in Barcelona (Institut d'Estudis Catalans). The first volume is a Spanish translation of Herbert Simon's "The Sciences of the Artificial". A second volume, on cognitive science and social networks, entitled "Interracion, Redes Sociales y Ciencias Cognitivas", by Carlos Lozares Colina, has also been published.

The Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) has announced the availability of a two-year postdoctoral research grant in the Department of Political Science and Public Law. Eligible candidates are persons who have received a PhD from a university other than the UAB after 1 July 1998 as well as holders of a PhD received from the UAB after 1 July 1998 who have had a minimum of two years experience in a postdoctoral research position at some other university of research center. The grants last a total of 2 years and cannot be renewed. The position begins during the first four-months of 2008. The grant amount i 24,750 Euros (gross) per year. Deadline: Applications must be submitted by to November 2, 2007. See the website of the Institute of Law and Technology at UAB for contact information and further details.

The Workshop on Formal Models of Norm Change will take place at the University of Luxembourg from November 29-30, 2007. Formal models of norm change have been drawing attention since the seminal works of Alchourrón and Bulygin on normative systems, and that of Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson on the logic of theory change. In order to represent the dynamics of obligations and permissions, several deontic logics have been proposed. However, these systems did not explicitly refer to possible changes in the underlying norms - if norms were mentioned, they were assumed to be invariable. See the Call for Participation for further information.

Research in AI and Law has, throughout its history, produced a variety of approaches by which legal cases can be modelled.  These approaches support different styles of reasoning for a variety of problem-solving contexts, such as decision-making, information retrieval, teaching, etc.  Particular legal cases that have received wide coverage in the AI and Law literature include: the infamous property law case of Pierson v. Post (see e.g. Berman and Hafner, ICAIL 1993; Gordon and Walton, COMMA 2006); other cases involving the capture of wild animals such as Young v. Hitchens and Keeble v. Hickeringill (see e.g. Berman and Hafner, ICAIL 1993; Bench-Capon and Rissland, JURIX 2001); US trade secrets cases such as Mason v. Jack Daniel Distillery (see e.g. Aleven and Ashley, ICAIL 1997); and, criminal cases such as the Rijkbloem case (see e.g. Bex et. al, ICAIL 2007). The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum in which researchers can present their own particular approach used for modelling such legal cases, with a view to considering the relative merits of the individual approaches.

See the Call for Papers for further information.

The Call for Papers for the the 20th International JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held in Leyden, The Netherlands, from 12-15 December 2007, has been published.

The Second International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 08) will take place in Toulouse, France in May of 2008. See the Call for Papers for further information.

The Legislative XML Summer School (LeX) will take place 10-15 September 2007 at the European University Institute, in San Domenico di Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

The LeX school is an intensive, 6-day program aimed at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, an understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative process, awareness of the tools based on legislative standards, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant documents throughout the participate in law-making process.

The LeX school will address standards concerning different aspects of legislation: abstract (logical) ways of identifying legislative documents, ways of structuring legislative documents and data, ways of dealing with changes in the law, ways of distinguishing and representing the different stages of the life cycle of a law text (from first drafts, to parliamentary discussions, to amendments, to subsequent modifications), ways of defining and applying conceptual classifications to law texts, ways of building executable representations of legislative knowledge.

Organising institutions: CIRSFID (University of Bologna), European University Institute, University of Amsterdam, and ITTIG-CNR (Florence).

Directors: Enrico Pattaro and Giovanni Sartor

Program committee: Tom van Engers, Monica Palmirani, Giovanni Sartor

Scientific committee: Carlo Biagioli, Alexander Boer, Gladys Boss Sholley, Raffaella Brighi, Angelo di Iorio, Enrico Francesconi, Tom Gordon, Caterina Lupo, Pierluigi Spinosa, Daniela Tiscornia, Radboud Winkels, Flavio Zeni

Contact for information: legislativexml@eui.eu

Web site (including the detailed program and link to the application form): http://www.one-lex.eu/Activities/summerschool/legislativexml.html

Information about the ICAIL 2007 conference, which took place June 4-8, 2007, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, such as slides of some of the talks and photos of the conference, is available now here.

The full ICAIL 2007 Conference Program, including the date and time of each presentation, is now available for downloading in PDF format.

The submission deadline for the JURISIN 2007 workshop, which will take place June 18 or 19, 2007, in Miyazaki, Japan, has been extended to April 20, 2007. The purpose of the workshop is to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion of both the fundamental and practical issues in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law.

A workshop on electronic discovery will be held on 4 June 2007 as part of the ICAIL 2007 conference, which will take place at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, from 4 June to 8 June, 2007. See the DESI Call for Papers for further information.

An eParticipation workshop, focusing on tools and techniques for analyzing citizen contributions, will take place May 20, 2007, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as part of the 8th Annual Digital Government Research Conference (dg.o 2007). Please see the workshop's Call for Papers for further information.

The First International Workshop on Juris Informatics (JURISIN 2007) will take place June 18 and/or 19, 2007, at the World Conference Center Summit in Miyazaki, Japan. The workshop is being organized in association with The 21th Annual Conference of The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI2007). See the Call for Papers for further information.

A workshop on reasoning about legal evidence will be held as part of the 23rd World Congress on Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Cracow, Poland, 1-6 August 2007. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from various fields interested in rational or descriptive models of legal evidential reasoning. To promote the exchange of ideas, the workshop organisers invite researchers from these disciplines to discuss different approaches to modelling reasoning about evidence.

Researchers who are interested in presenting a paper at the workshop are invited to submit a two-page abstract by May 1st, 2007. Authors of accepted workshop contributions will be invited to submit a revised version of their paper to an edited volume to appear with Ashgate
publishers in 2008.

For more information see the workshop website.

The deadline for submitting papers for ICAIL 2007 has been extended with one week to Sunday January 21st 2006. Please upload your paper to the Conference Tool at: http://icail07.leibnizcenter.org/

ICAIL 2007 will take place at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, from June 4 to June 8, 2007. See the Call for Papers for further information.

A Special Session on e-Contracting in Collaborative Networks Scenarios has been announced. The session will be co-located with the 8th IFIP Working Conference on VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES (PRO-VE’07), which will take place in Guimarães, Portugal, September 10-12, 2007. Please see the Call for Papers for further information.

ICAIL 2007 will take place at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, from June 4 to June 8, 2007. See the Call for Papers for further information.

The 10th International Legal Informatics Symposium (IRIS 2007) will take place at the Law Faculty of the University of Salzburg from 22-24 February 2007. IRIS is the largest German-language computers and law conference in Europe. Participation is free of charge, but registration (Anmeldung) is requested. For further information, please contact Anton Geist.

The JURIX conferences are held under the auspices of JURIX: The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (http://www.jurix.nl). JURIX is a forum for research on information technology as applied to the law, and in particular on the development and application of artificial intelligence in the legal domain. Since 1988, JURIX has organized annual international conferences on current research in the field.

The 19th International JURIX conference will be held in Paris (France) from
7-9th December 2006.

For the complete program, and details on conference registration, visit
http://www.jurix2006.org/

The Fourth IASTED International Conference on Law and Technology will take place October 9-11, 2006, at the MIT Faculty Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

The conference brings together experts in the legal and legal informatics fields for a series of tutorials and paper presentations. On October 9, Professor Dan L. Burk of the University of Minnesota Law School will deliver the keynote speech on "Owning Avatars: Legal Control of Human and Non-human Data Representations."

For the complete program, and details on conference registration, visit http://www.iasted.org/conferences/home-545.html.

A workshop on Legal Informatic Systems is being organized as part of the International Legal Informatics Symposium (IRIS 2007), which will take place in Salzburg, Austria, from February 22-24, 2007. The workshop is being organized by the Special Interest Group on Legal Informatic Systems of German Society for Informatics. A Call for Presentations is available. A title and 2-3 page abstract of the talk should be sent to the workshop chair, Burkhard Schafer, by October 31, 2006. Please contact him for the full Call for Participation or further information.

The Conference on Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings will take place at Cardozo Law School, New York City (Manhattan), January 28-29, 2007. This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars and practitioners from such fields as law, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and linguistics who are interested in the graphic visualization of legal evidentiary inference and its support by software tools. The final program is now available at the conference web site. Attendance is open to everyone; there is no registration fee. For more details see the conference web site.

The Eighth International Workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science (DEON 2006), will take place in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from 12-4 July 2006.

Argumentation has evolved from its original study primarily by philosophers to emerge in the last ten years as an important sub-discipline of Artificial Intelligence. Among the significant contributions resulting have been approaches to modelling and analysis of defeasible reasoning, formal bases for negotiation and dialogue processes in multiagent systems, and the use of argumentation theory in A.I. applications whose nature is not best described through traditional logics, e.g. legal reasoning, evaluation of conflicting beliefs, etc. The process of interpreting and and exploiting classical treatments of Argumentation Theory in effective computational terms has led to a rich interchange of ideas among researchers from diverse disciplines such as Philosophy, Linguistics, A.I. and Economics.

Argumentation related workshops are now well-established events at the major Artificial Intelligence related Conferences, e.g. the workshop series on Computational Models of Natural Argument held in conjunction with IJCAI and ECAI, and the series of ArgMAS workshops held in conjunction with AAMAS.

While work over the past five years has done much to consolidate diverse contributions to the field, many new concerns have been identified and form the basis of current research. Among such concerns are: approaches to coping with intractability issues; representation of argument structures in multiagent system settings; developing robust treatments of dynamically evolving argumentation frameworks; semantics for capturing concepts such as "persuasiveness", "credibility" and "impact" of arguments; computational bases for distinguishing classes of ``acceptable'' arguments, etc.

This special issue of Artificial Intelligence Journal on the theme of Argumentation in A.I., is intended to present the current state-of-the-art in argumentation to a general audience, thus increasing awareness of the possibilities that argumentation offers among specialists in areas of A.I. which have not yet considered this as a way of addressing their problems. Equally it will present opportunities for those not currently involved with argumentation to consider new perspectives from which to tackle problems. In sum, the special issue aims both to spread the dissemination of argumentation ideas, and to widen the boundaries of the argumentation community.

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