Both legal scholars and computer scientists will be curious to know how the gap between law and computing can be bridged. The law, and also jurisprudence, is based on language, and is mainly textual. Every syntactic system has its semantic range, and so does language, which in law achieves a high degree of professional precision. The use of visualisations is a syntactic supplement and opens up a new understanding of legal forms. This understanding was reinforced by the paradigm shift from textual law to legal informatics, in which visual formal notations are decisive. The authors have been dealing with visualisation approaches for a long time and summarise them here for discussion. In this book, a multiphase transformation from the legal domain to computer code is explored. The authors consider law enforcement by computer. The target view is that legal machines are legal actors that are capable of triggering institutional facts. In the visualisation of statutory law, an approach called Structural Legal Visualisation is presented. Specifically, the visualisation of legal meaning is linked with tertium comparationis, the third part of the comparison. In a legal documentation system, representing one legal source with multiple documents is viewed as a granularity problem. The authors propose to supplement legislative documents ex ante with explicit logic-oriented information in the form of a mini thesaurus. In contrast to so-called strong relations such as synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy/hyponymy, one should consider weak relations: (1) dialectical relations, a term of dialectical antithesis; (2) context relations; and (3) metaphorical relations, which means the use of metaphors for terms. The chapters trace topics such as the distinction between knowledge visualisation and knowledge representation, the visualisation of Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, the separation of law and legal science, legal subsumption, legal relations, legal machines, encapsulation, compliance, transparency, standard cases and hard cases.

In this, the third edition of Private International Law and the Internet, Professor Dan Svantesson provides a detailed and insightful account of what is emerging as the most crucial current issue in private international law; that is, how the Internet affects and is affected by the four fundamental questions: When should a lawsuit be entertained by the courts? Which state's law should be applied? When should a court that can entertain a lawsuit decline to do so? And will a judgment rendered in one country be recognized and enforced in another? He identifies and investigates twelve characteristics of Internet communication that are relevant to these questions, and then proceeds with a detailed discussion of what is required of modern private international law rules. Professor Svantesson's approach focuses on several issues that have far-reaching practical consequences in the Internet context, including the following: • cross-border defamation; • cross-border business contracts; • cross-border consumer contracts; and • cross-border intellectual property issues. A wide survey of private international law solutions encompasses insightful and timely analyses of relevant laws adopted in a variety of countries including Australia, England, Hong Kong, the United States, Germany, Sweden, and China as well as in a range of international instruments. There is also a chapter on advances in geo-identification technology and its special value for legal practice. The book concludes with two model international conventions, one on cross-border defamation and one on cross-border contracts; as well as a set of practical check-lists to guide legal practitioners faced with cross-border matters within the discussed fields. Professor Svantesson's book brings together a wealth of research findings in the overlapping disciplines of law and technology that will be of particular utility to practitioners and academics working in this new and rapidly changing field. His thoughtful analysis of the interplay of the developing Internet and private international law will also be of great value, as will the tools he offers with which to anticipate the future. Private International Law and the Internet provides a remarkable stimulus to continue working towards globally acceptable rules on jurisdiction, applicable law, and recognition and enforcement of judgments for communication via the Internet.

This cutting-edge volume offers a theoretical and applied introduction to the emerging legal technology and informatics industry.

Following an interdisciplinary approach linking image and legal sciences, Law and Images attempts to outline a research field “Law and Images” in parallel to the well-established “Law and Literature”. It also systematizes images in law, of law and for law.

Informatics and the Foundations of Legal Reasoning represents a close collaboration between a wide range of disciplines and countries. Fourteen papers, together with a long analytical introduction by the editors, were selected from the contributions of legal theorists, computer scientists, philosophers and logicians who were members of an International Working Group supported by the European Commission. The Group was mandated to work towards determining how far the law is amenable to formal modeling, and in what ways computers might assist legal thinking and practice. The book is the result of discussions held by the Group over two and half years. It will help students and researchers from different backgrounds to focus on a common set of topics of increasing general interest. It embodies the results of work in progress and suggests many issues for further discussion. A stimulating text for undergraduate and graduate courses in law, philosophy and computer science departments, as well as for those interested in the place of computers in legal practice, especially at the international level.

The Ethics of Emerging Media engages with enduring ethical questions while addressing critical questions concerning ethical boundaries at the forefront of new media development. This collection provides a rare opportunity to ask how emerging media affect the ethical choices in our lives and the lives of people across the globe. Centering on different new media forms from eBay to Wikipedia, each chapter raises questions about how changing media formats affect current theoretical understanding of ethics. By interrogating traditional ethical theory, we can better understand the challenges to ethical decision making in an age of rapidly evolving media. Each chapter focuses on a specific case within the broader conceptual fabric of ethical theory. The case studies ground the discussion of ethics in practical applications while, at the same time, addressing moral dilemmas that have plagued us for generations. The specific applications will undoubtedly continue to unfold, but the ethical questions will endure.

This innovative book proposes new theories on how the legal system can be made more comprehensible, usable and empowering for people through the use of design principles. Utilising key case studies and providing real-world examples of legal innovation, the book moves beyond discussion to action. It offers a rich set of examples, demonstrating how various design methods, including information, service, product and policy design, can be leveraged within research and practice.

The first critical overview of an emerging field, with contributions from both scholars and artist-practitioners. Over the last decade, machinima—the use of computer game engines to create movies—has emerged as a vibrant area in digital culture. Machinima as a filmmaking tool grew from the bottom up, driven by enthusiasts who taught themselves to deploy technologies from computer games to create animated films quickly and cheaply. The Machinima Reader is the first critical overview of this rapidly developing field. The contributors include both academics and artist-practitioners. They explore machinima from multiple perspectives, ranging from technical aspects of machinima, from real-time production to machinima as a performative and cinematic medium, while paying close attention to the legal, cultural, and pedagogical contexts for machinima. The Machinima Reader extends critical debates originating within the machinima community to a wider audience and provides a foundation for scholarly work from a variety of disciplines. This is the first book to chart the emergence of machinima as a game-based cultural production that spans technologies and media, forming new communities of practice on its way to a history, an aesthetic, and a market.

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity.