Legal Document Research Articles

Evidence Prediction Method Based on Sentence Selection for Legal Documents

In order to solve the problem that it is difficult to find evidence from a large number of legal document statements and the irrelevant statements in a large number of document sample data will cause a great interference to the prediction results and further improve the accuracy of evidence prediction, this paper puts forward an intelligent evidence criterion prediction method for legal documents based on the comprehensive consideration of legal problems, the nature of statements, and the characteristics of answers. The binary cross-entropy of different statements is used to obtain the interaction information between different statements. Through experiments, it is found that the score of Joint F1 proposed in this paper is 70.07%, which is more accurate than the mainstream model and also verifies the effectiveness of the scheme.

Creating a Global Legal and Policy Database and Document Repository: Challenges and Lessons Learned From the World Health Organization Sexual, Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health Policy Survey.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has collected information on policies on sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health (SRMNCAH) over many years. Creating a global survey that works for every country context is a well-recognized challenge. A comprehensive SRMNCAH policy survey was conducted by WHO from August 2018 through May 2019. WHO regional and country offices coordinated with Ministries of Health and/or national institutions who completed the questionnaire. The survey was completed by 150 of 194 WHO Member States using an online platform that allowed for submission of national source documents. A validation of the responses for selected survey questions against content of the national source documents was conducted for 101 countries (67%) for the first time in the administration of the survey. Data validation draws attention to survey questions that may have been misunderstood or where there was a lot of missing data, but varying methods for validating survey responses against source documents and separate analysis of laws from policies and guidelines may have hindered the overall conclusions of this process. The SRMNCAH policy survey both provided a platform for countries to track their progress in adopting WHO recommendations in national SRMNCAH-related legislation, policies, guidelines and strategies and was used to create a global database and searchable document repository. The outputs of the SRMNCAH policy survey are resources whose importance will be enriched through policy dialogues and wide utilization. Lessons learned from the methodology used for this survey can help to improve future updates and inform similar efforts.

Rhetorical portfolio for the Bachelor of Law Education in Dagestan

The subject of this research is the currently relevant question of the formation of rhetorical portfolio for the Bachelor of Law Education in the Dagestan State University (discipline 44.03.01). This portfolio is highly demanded due to the need for improving the quality of professional competencies of students during the spread of COVID-19 pandemic, which allows the student to share educational information with the group remotely. The term “Rhetorical Portfolio” suggests which course it should applied in. It may perform the function of a legal document. The scientific novelty of this research lies in detailed description of the topic; offer of a possible structure and approximate thematic content of the rhetorical portfolio; advise to include in the rhetorical portfolio student's achievements, various tasks and reference materials, legal documentation, flaws in the educational process, and recommendations that would allow the future pedagogue of law to succeed in their activity. Rhetorical portfolio is a new technology developed on the basis of extensive experience in teaching eloquence to the humanities students; what needs to be implemented in the educational process and effectively used in modern educational system. Therefore, the material is prepared using the method of observation over educational process, various surveys, and analysis of rhetorical classes. The author underlines the importance of considering local peculiarities in communication to ensure the success of any constructive rhetorical speech in multinational Dagestan. This would also contribute to the development of skills of peer review, critical re-evaluation of the content of the material, and reflection. This document, which consists of three parts, is one-off nature and has variations, should turn into a collective rhetorical portfolio in order to activate the educational process. This is the reflection of an alternative point of view to demonstrate a true picture of personal and collective academic performance.

Challenges and Open Problems of Legal Document Anonymization

Data sharing is a central aspect of judicial systems. The openly accessible documents can make the judiciary system more transparent. On the other hand, the published legal documents can contain much sensitive information about the involved persons or companies. For this reason, the anonymization of these documents is obligatory to prevent privacy breaches. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other modern privacy-protecting regulations have strict definitions of private data containing direct and indirect identifiers. In legal documents, there is a wide range of attributes regarding the involved parties. Moreover, legal documents can contain additional information about the relations between the involved parties and rare events. Hence, the personal data can be represented by a sparse matrix of these attributes. The application of Named Entity Recognition methods is essential for a fair anonymization process but is not enough. Machine learning-based methods should be used together with anonymization models, such as differential privacy, to reduce re-identification risk. On the other hand, the information content (utility) of the text should be preserved. This paper aims to summarize and highlight the open and symmetrical problems from the fields of structured and unstructured text anonymization. The possible methods for anonymizing legal documents discussed and illustrated by case studies from the Hungarian legal practice.

Legal document recommendation system: a dictionary based approach

PurposeIn the Indian judicial system, the court considers interpretations of similar previous judgments for the present case. An essential requirement of legal practitioners is to determine the most relevant judgments from an enormous amount of judgments for preparing supportive, beneficial and favorable arguments against the opponent. It urges a strong demand to develop a Legal Document Recommendation System (LDRS) to automate the process. In existing works, traditionally preprocessed judgment corpus is processed by Doc2Vec to learn semantically rich judgment embedding space (i.e. vector space). Here, vectors of semantically relevant judgments are in close proximity, as Doc2Vec can effectively capture semantic meanings. The enormous amount of judgments produces a huge noisy corpus and vocabulary which possesses a significant challenge: traditional preprocessing cannot fully eliminate noisy data from the corpus and due to this, the Doc2Vec demands huge memory and time to learn the judgment embedding. It also adversely affects the recommendation performance in terms of correctness. This paper aims to develop an effective and efficient LDRS to support civilians and the legal fraternity.Design/methodology/approachTo overcome previously mentioned challenges, this research proposes the LDRS that uses the proposed Generalized English and Indian Legal Dictionary (GEILD) which keeps the corpus of relevant dictionary words only and discards noisy elements. Accordingly, the proposed LDRS significantly reduces the corpus size, which can potentially improve the space and time efficiency of Doc2Vec.FindingsThe experimental results confirm that the proposed LDRS with GEILD yield superior performance in terms of accuracy, F1-Score, MCC-Score, with significant improvement in the space and time efficiency.Originality/valueThe proposed LDRS uses the customized domain-specific preprocessing and novel legal dictionary (i.e. GEILD) to precisely recommend the relevant judgments. The proposed LDRS can be incorporated with online legal search repositories/engines to enrich their functionality.

Legal document recommendation system: A cluster based pairwise similarity computation

Legal practitioners analyze relevant previous judgments to prepare favorable and advantageous arguments for an ongoing case. In Legal domain, recommender systems (RS) effectively identify and recommend referentially and/or semantically relevant judgments. Due to the availability of enormous amounts of judgments, RS needs to compute pairwise similarity scores for all unique judgment pairs in advance, aiming to minimize the recommendation response time. This practice introduces the scalability issue as the number of pairs to be computed increases quadratically with the number of judgments i.e., O (n2). However, there is a limited number of pairs consisting of strong relevance among the judgments. Therefore, it is insignificant to compute similarities for pairs consisting of trivial relevance between judgments. To address the scalability issue, this research proposes a graph clustering based novel Legal Document Recommendation System (LDRS) that forms clusters of referentially similar judgments and within those clusters find semantically relevant judgments. Hence, pairwise similarity scores are computed for each cluster to restrict search space within-cluster only instead of the entire corpus. Thus, the proposed LDRS severely reduces the number of similarity computations that enable large numbers of judgments to be handled. It exploits a highly scalable Louvain approach to cluster judgment citation network, and Doc2Vec to capture the semantic relevance among judgments within a cluster. The efficacy and efficiency of the proposed LDRS are evaluated and analyzed using the large real-life judgments of the Supreme Court of India. The experimental results demonstrate the encouraging performance of proposed LDRS in terms of Accuracy, F1-Scores, MCC Scores, and computational complexity, which validates the applicability for scalable recommender systems.

A Study on the Regulations of the Automated Legal Document Drafting Service

A Study on the Regulations of the Automated Legal Document Drafting Service

'Smart' Lawyering: Integrating Technology Competence into the Legal Practice Curriculum

Technology has changed modern law practice. Ethics rules obligate lawyers to understand whether, when, and how to use it to deliver services. But most law schools do not incorporate the so-called “Duty of Technology Competence” into the required curriculum. Despite broad calls for legal education to make students more practice-ready, there is no clear path forward for how to weave this valuable professional skill into coursework for all students. This Article supplies one. The legal practice course should pair technology competence with traditional legal writing and research work. Lawyers do not draft memos or perform legal research or manage caseloads in a vacuum insulated from modern innovation; clients now demand a more efficient and multi-disciplinary approach that often includes technology. Small changes to the traditional legal practice syllabus can create awareness of technology’s impact on everyday lawyering work and provide students hands-on experience with: (1) Legal Document Proficiency; (2) Legal Research Analytics & Document Integration; (3) E-Discovery; (4) Law Practice Technology; and (5) Data Security. The skills curriculum must mirror expectations for how twenty-first century lawyers perform fundamental tasks, including new ethical challenges they face and opportunities they have to use tools to create efficient and effective work product. Through concrete classroom examples from mobile lawyering to document automation to cloud computing to judicial analytics, as well as “Technology Spotlight Exercises” available in a collaborative online repository, the reader will walk away with strategies for combining “smart” lawyering skills with traditional coursework for every law student.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ СВОБОДЫ В КОНСТИТУЦИИ КАК ЯДЕРНОМ ЖАНРЕ ДИСКУРСА ПРАВОВОГО ДОКУМЕНТА

ОСОБЕННОСТИ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ СВОБОДЫ В КОНСТИТУЦИИ КАК ЯДЕРНОМ ЖАНРЕ ДИСКУРСА ПРАВОВОГО ДОКУМЕНТА

An Evolving Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Legal Document Classification

An Evolving Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Legal Document Classification

Legal Document Control one of Basic Conditions to Protect and Ensure Human Right

The article has analyzed the significance of legal document control, which is considered one of basic conditions to protect, ensure all human rights, freedom and constitutional, legitimate interests. Although, the Vietnamese legal system is more and more complete, there are limitations on legal document control. The article has showed clearly the negative influences of inappropriate legal regulations on human rights and interests. On that basis, the article has referred basic rules of legal document control aspect: The control of constitutionality, lawfulness and rationality in all periods of legal document formulation process.
 Keywords: Legal supervision, supervision of legal documents, mechanisms for supervising legal (normative) documents, constitutionality, legitimacy, profitability.

Major Translation Methods Used in Legal Documents: Translation of a Marriage Contract from Arabic into English

Throughout history, the use of translation methods has constituted a source of lots of debates; some scholars advocate literal translation, others advocate free translation. In legal translation which is a special and specialized area of translational activity, and where documents are characterized by brevity, economy, and neatness to prevent fraud, additions, omissions or alterations in the text, mistakes or mistranslations can lead to disastrous repercussions. The present study deals primarily with the methods that translators of legal texts follow and adopt when rendering a legal document. A concise account of translation theories that have been adopted and are still being applied to legal translation is offered to attempt to show the main views towards the application of such translation theories to legal translation. Major methods often used in the translation of legal documents are then presented, discussing their validity to legal translation. This presentation includes literal translation, free translation, the functional approach to translation, transliteration & transcription, loan translation, adaptation, description by definitions, lexical expansion, and descriptive substitution. The empirical part of this study is concerned with the analysis of a marriage contract translated from Arabic into English in an attempt to shed some light on the major methods adopted by the translator of this document and the reason behind using such methods.

Major Translation Methods Used in Legal Documents: Translation of a Marriage Contract from Arabic into English

Throughout history, the use of translation methods has constituted a source of lots of debates; some scholars advocate literal translation, others advocate free translation. In legal translation which is a special and specialized area of translational activity, and where documents are characterized by brevity, economy, and neatness to prevent fraud, additions, omissions or alterations in the text, mistakes or mistranslations can lead to disastrous repercussions. The present study deals primarily with the methods that translators of legal texts follow and adopt when rendering a legal document. A concise account of translation theories that have been adopted and are still being applied to legal translation is offered to attempt to show the main views towards the application of such translation theories to legal translation. Major methods often used in the translation of legal documents are then presented, discussing their validity to legal translation. This presentation includes literal translation, free translation, the functional approach to translation, transliteration & transcription, loan translation, adaptation, description by definitions, lexical expansion, and descriptive substitution. The empirical part of this study is concerned with the analysis of a marriage contract translated from Arabic into English in an attempt to shed some light on the major methods adopted by the translator of this document and the reason behind using such methods.

Combining Domain Knowledge Extraction With Graph Long Short-Term Memory for Learning Classification of Chinese Legal Documents

It is of great importance for procedure retrieval to find an effective classification method of Chinese legal documents with deep semantic understanding, as the electronic documents of Chinese law have massive volume and complex structure. In this paper, a method for learning Chinese legal document classification using Graph LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) combined with domain knowledge extraction is proposed. First, the judicial domain model is constructed based on ontologies that include top-level ontology and domain-specific ontology. Second, the legal documents are divided into different knowledge blocks through top-level ontology and domain-specific ontology. Third, information is extracted from the knowledge blocks according to the legal domain model and stored in XML files. At last, Graph LSTM is applied for classification. The experiments show that compared with the traditional classification methods of support vector machine (SVM) and LSTM, Graph LSTM has higher classification accuracy and better classification performance.

Review on Direction to Set Drafting Legal Document Type Essay Questions of Public Law in the National Bar Examination

Review on Direction to Set Drafting Legal Document Type Essay Questions of Public Law in the National Bar Examination

The Relationship Between Tobacco Use and Legal Document Gender-Marker Change, Hormone Use, and Gender-Affirming Surgery in a United States Sample of Trans-Feminine and Trans-Masculine Individuals: Implications for Cardiovascular Health.

Transgender individuals smoke tobacco at disproportionately higher rates than the general U.S. population, and concurrent use of gender-affirming hormones (estrogen or testosterone) and tobacco confers greater cardiovascular (CV) risk. This study examines the relationship between tobacco use and legal document gender-marker change, and medical/surgical interventions for gender transition. Data came from an Internet-based survey of U.S. trans-feminine (n = 631) and trans-masculine (n = 473) individuals. We used multivariable logistic regression to investigate the relationship between past 3-month tobacco use and legal document gender-marker change, hormone use, and gender-affirming surgery controlling for demographic covariates and enacted and felt stigma. Compared to trans-feminine participants, trans-masculine individuals reported significantly higher rates of lifetime (74.4% vs. 63.5%) and past 3-month tobacco use (47.8% vs. 36.1%), and began smoking at an earlier age (14.5 vs. 15.5 years). Trans-feminine smokers reported significantly more frequent and heavier use. Adjusting for demographic covariates and enacted and felt stigma, legal document gender-marker change was associated with lower tobacco-use odds among trans-feminine individuals, whereas gender-affirming surgery predicted lower smoking odds among trans-masculine individuals. There were no significant differences in tobacco use by hormone use status. In this study, trans-masculine individuals were more likely to smoke and trans-feminine individuals reported heavier use. It is concerning that individuals receiving hormones did not report lower smoking rates, given the elevated CV risk of this combination. This is a missed opportunity to intervene on a major public health issue and highlights the need for smoking cessation interventions in this population.

Ethics of Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Drafting Legal Documents

This article focuses on the second step in the due diligence process. While it addresses the question of competency, it focuses more on the further steps a lawyer must take to ensure that the use of the service as part of the representation of a client is consistent with the lawyer’s other ethical obligations. While it is important to emphasize that competency requires that the lawyer must be able to assess whether the work product is comparable to what a human would produce, competency is of course a fact-depending inquiry: whether a will is competently drafted turns on the standard of care of a practitioner who drafts wills. This article focuses more on how a lawyer can determine whether it is ethical to use a competent service that augments document drafting. While addressing how ethical concerns arise across typical practice areas, it highlights a practice area where the risks for violations may be particularly acute because the need for confidentiality is high, and the potential for undetected conflicts of interest is great: patent practice. This article identifies the issues, describes the potential risks, and explains what protections a lawyer should look for in the terms of service of an automated legal document drafting site to ensure ethical representation.

Проект Конституції УНР 1917 р.: передумови появи, зміст, сучасні оцінки

The Draft Constitution of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), was prepared by the Commission of the Central Council of Ukraine in December 1917, had almost not been reflected in contemporary Ukrainian historiography. The subject of the research is the results of the work of the Legal Document Preparation Commission, which gave a legitimacy to the restoration of the Ukrainian statehood and were embodied in the Draft Constitution of the UNR. The methodology of the article is determined by the requirements of historical and legal research. The method of comparative legal analysis of legislative acts and normative documents allows comparing the Draft Constitution of the UNR with the Statute on the State System, Rights and Freedoms of the UNR, worked out on the basis of the above mentioned Draft. The analysis of the constitutional draft was carried out taking into account the specific historical conditions and circumstances of its emergence, according to the historical method of the interpretation of law. The method of qualitative analysis of legal documents was used to scrutinize the norms enshrined in the Draft Constitution of the UNR. The usage of various research methods allows following the evolution of the constitutional entrenchment of the restoration of Ukrainian statehood in the Universals of the Central Council of Ukraine, in laws and constitutional documents, as well as presenting Mychailo grushevsky’s vision of components of the future constitution, his confidence in the democratic character of the Ukrainian state, giving an opportunity to analyze the draft Constitution of the UNR, published in December 1917, and comparing it with the Statute on the State System, Rights and Freedoms of the UNR, which was approved by the Small Council in April 1918. According to the constitutional draft, the UNR, consisting of 10 provinces, should become an autonomous part of the Russian Federal Republic. The Draft Constitution included also the principles of popular sovereignty, democratic system, the division of powers, the creation of check-and-balance system in the functioning of the authorities, judicial guarantees of the sovereignty of the Ukrainian republic, decentralization and development of self-government, protection of the citizen rights and the rights of national minorities.

Legal Case Document Classification Application Based on an Improved Hybrid Approach

Legal Case Document Classification Application Based on an Improved Hybrid Approach

Considering the Individualized Education Program: A Call for Applying Contract Theory to an Essential Legal Document

Considering the Individualized Education Program: A Call for Applying Contract Theory to an Essential Legal Document