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CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
Presentations and papers are posted in chronological order in this section. We keep publishing documents as we receive them.
SESSION DESCRIPTIONS
| Session 1 Free access to law: impact on emerging countries | 09:25 - 10:40 Thursday October 25, 2007 |
| Over the last few years, there has been a considerable increase in
the number of development projects promoting free access to law in emerging countries.
This session is designed to assess the real impact of free access to law in those countries.
Project leaders will briefly present their achievements as well as the challenges they are
facing. The session will end with a roundtable discussion bringing project leaders together
with various representatives from development agencies.
Available documents:
|
Barthélémy Kéré JuriBurkina, LII in Burkina Faso Miguel Juston PacLII – LII in Pacific Islands José Leopoldo Vega Correa Departamento de Informatica Juridica, Mexico Ivan Mokanov LexUM, Canada Mariano Magsalin LawPhil, Philippines Mariya Badeva-Bright SAFLII, South-Africa Kerry Anderson SAFLII, South Africa Session president: Ivan Mokanov |
| Session 2 Panel: Financing bodies' take on free access to law development projects | 11:00 - 12:15 Thursday - October 25, 2007 |
|
Over the past few years, a substantial amount of investment has been made with the goal
of helping developing countries through the strengthening of their legal and judicial
institutions. What place does access to legal information have in the reinforcement of
democracy and the rule of law? What role can those who promote free access to law play
in the legal and economic developement of emerging countries? What are the challlenges
involved in the transfer of information technologies and know-how? All these questions and
many more will be up for discussion and commentary between the panelists and with the audience.
Available documents:
|
Stéphane Roberge CIDA, Canada Pierre-Paul Lemyre LexUM, Canada David Satola World Bank Amadou Diallo Organisation internationale de la Francophonie Khaled Fourati IDRC Session president: Pierre-Paul Lemyre |
| Session 3 New media, new doctrines | 14:00 - 16:00 Thursday - October 25, 2007 |
| The definition of secondary legal material, in other words, doctrine,
is in itself a debated topic: what makes a text a doctrinal source? Recent developments on the
Web fuel this old debate. What is doctrine today? Is it the same it was in the past, consisting in
legal treatises and law journal papers? What about self-published papers and blogs, posted by lawyers and Law professors,
Wikipedia articles and other collaborative works? This session will bring together legal
technologists as well as old- and new-style authors.
Available documents: |
Olufunmilayo B. Arewa Northwestern University, USA Michael Geist University of Ottawa, Canada Graham Greenleaf AustLII, Australia Vincent Gautrais University of Montreal, Canada Hughes-Jehan Vibert ÉRID, France Session president: Graham Greenleaf |
| Session 4 Panel: New doctrines, new channels | 16:15 - 17:15 Thursday - October 25, 2007 |
| Free access to primary legal material (caselaw and legislation) inevitably involves a restructuration of the commercial market of judicial publication. Will increasingly free access to doctrine trigger the same effect? If so, will these changes be to the Law and end users' advantage? Is the economy of secondary materials production at stake? |
Connie Crosby WeirFoulds LLP, Canada Darrel Pink CanLII, Canada Daniel Poulin LexUM, Canada Karim Benyekhlef CRDP, Canada Peter Martin Cornell Unviersity, USA Session president: Daniel Poulin |
| Session 5 Panel: Access to Judgments | 08:00 - 09:15 Friday - October 26, 2007 |
| In this session, members of the Canadian judiciary and representatives of the free
access to law movement will discuss access to decisions. A model policy adopted in September 2005 by the Canadian
Judicial Council and proposed to Canadian courts states that the public's right to transparent justice is an
important constitutional rule and that it generally outweighs the equally fundamental right to privacy (CJC, Model
Policy for Access to Court Records in Canada, Ottawa, 2005). However, reconciling the principles of transparency
and respect for privacy is a constant challenge for Canadian courts and tribunals, particularly in family law.
The stakes are in no way local; in all countries, the expansion in dissemination of law requires a reconciliation
of the values of transparency and privacy.
Available documents: |
Darrel Pink CanLII, Canada J. René de la Sablonnière Court of Quebec, Canada Frédéric Pelletier LexUM, Canada Kerry Anderson SAFLII, South Africa J. David MacAdam Nova Scotia Supreme Court, Canada Joe Ury BAILII, United Kingdom J. Garrett A. Handrigan Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada Daniel Champagne SOQUIJ, Canada Session president: Frédéric Pelletier |
| Session 6 Legal Information Overload | 09:15 - 10:45 Friday - October 26, 2007 |
| Information abounds. The number of websites seems to be growing exponentially.
Blogs and pages on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and other Xangas continue
to increase. Today, there is an overabundance of information in all domains, including the legal
one. An excess of legal information is not, however, a completely new evil. Scholars in the
nineteenth century often decried the number of decisions published. A century later, all decisions,
even the most routine, are published. The end result is that lawyers, notaries, judges and citizens
are confronted with an enormous amount of legal information. Given the unlikelihood of any change in
the situation, there is a great need to harness this information before it gets out of hand.
The topic will be examined from a number of different angles: that of the judge and the no-citation
rules aimed at reducing the amount of invoked case-law, that of the lawyer, notary and researcher
as well as that of information systems specialist. The insights resulting from this multi-disciplinary
approach will undoubtedly contribute to a deeper understanding of the problem and point towards
some possible solutions.
Available documents: |
J. Richard G. Mosley Federal Court of Canada, Canada Thomas R. Bruce Cornell University, USA Catherine Best Boughton Law Corporation, Canada Graham Greenleaf University of New South Wales-AustLII, Australia Marc-André Morissette LexUM, Canada Ivan Mokanov LexUM, Canada Session president: Ivan Mokanov |
| Session 7A Free access to law: Technical challenges and solutions | 11:00 - 12:30 Friday - October 26, 2007 |
| Legal information experts present their recent projects. Practical challenges encountered while developing access to legal information will be at the centre of this more technical session designed specifically for participants with strong interest in the latest technological developments, information architecture and information sciences in general. |
Marc-André Morissette LexUM, Canada Donna Buckingham NZLII, New Zealand Andrew Mowbray AustLII, Australia Philip Chung AustLII, Australia Session president: Donna Buckingham |
| Session 7B Free access to law: New Initiatives | 11:00 - 12:30 Friday - October 26, 2007 |
| The various initiatives taking place in West Africa as well as the work being
done in South America and Latin America have breathed new life into the circulation of law. This session
will both demonstrate the quality and depth of the work being done in the field and show us some of
the difficulties encountered when attempting something new.
Available documents: |
Barthélémy Kéré JuriBurkina, Burkina Faso Carlos Gregorio Instituto de Investigacion para la Justicia, Argentine El Hadji Malick Ndiaye / Amavi Tagodoe SenLex, Canada Mariya Badeva-Bright SAFLII, South-Africa Session president: Barthélémy Kéré |
| Session 7C Free access to law: formalization and modelization | 11:00 - 12:30 Friday - October 26, 2007 |
| Tomorrow's innovations are foreshadowed in some of the more
theoretical papers which aim to better understand the challenges of textual legal material.
The creation of multilingual legal information systems, the move towards a legal semantic Web,
formal languages for the description of legal documents, all of these issues are of great
importance for those who wish to catch a glimpse of the future of legal information systems.
Available documents:
|
Ginevra Peruginelli / Enrico Francesconi ITTIG, Italy Lenore Hamilton PacLII, LII in Pacific Islands Monica Palmirani University of Bologna, Italy Session president: Lenore Hamilton |
| Session 8A Preserving the past and present for the future | 13:45 - 15:00 Friday - October 26, 2007 |
| Long-term preservation of legal material is a key issue.
Some initiatives aim for preservation of pre-digital documents, while others strive to ensure
the safekeeping of born digital documents. While preservation of pre-digital documents raises
a number of questions with regard to their conversion into digital form, preservation of born
digital documents presents a challenge owing to their transient and volatile nature. The goal
of this session is to identify the challenges faced by institutions involved in digitalizing,
managing and archiving large volumes of legal documents. These preservation tasks will also be
examined with a view to furthering open access to law.
Available documents: |
Ingrid Parent Library and Archives Canada Rosalie Fox Supreme court of Canada Sandra Wilkins University of British-Columbia, Canada Janine Miller CanLII, Canada Georges André Silber School of Mines, France Session president: Rosalie Fox |
| Session 8B The rise of technologies in Canada's judicial system: challenges and solutions | 13:45 - 15:00 Friday - October 26, 2007 |
| Legal documents take on a standard form: one judgment looks like the next and statutes
resemble each other. It's possible to infer formal models that can express these regularities.
It's equally possible to define specifications in advance for new legal documents. Standardizing
the form of documents, processes, interfaces, forms and data sharing is also conceivable.
Achieveing all of this is of great importance if we wish to take full advantage of new
information technologies. In Canada, the Canadian Judicial Council's Judges Technology Advisory Committee (JTAC) has created number of such norms. The Canadian citation committee and LexUM are together another source of these standards. The Canadian Centre for Court Technology initiative as well as the establishment of the E-discovery Canada Group are also signs of new developments in this field. Participants in these projects will discuss the options that are available in Canada in these matters. Available documents: |
Dominic Jaar Bell Canada Frédéric Pelletier LexUM, Canada Véronique Abad LexUM, Canada J. René de la Sablonnière Senior associate cheif justice, Court of Quebec Session president: Véronique Abad |
| Session 9 Panel: Are users' needs being met? | 15:15 - 16:15 Friday - October 26, 2007 |
| The Conference will end with an interactive plenary session bringing together many of the speakers, representatives of various groups of users and the audience. Chaired by the Conference host, the plenary session will give everyone the opportunity to state their lessons learned, their wishes and concerns. The session will include plenty of time for questions and comments from the public. |
Thomas R. Bruce Cornell University, USA Carole Curtis Lawyer from Ontario, Canada Nathalie Roy ÉducaLoi, Canada Ivan Mokanov LexUM, Canada Isabelle Pilon CAIJ, Canada Andrew Mowbray AustLII, Australia Session president: Thomas R. Bruce |
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