Citizen Science for Citizen Access to Law

Dublin Core

Title

Citizen Science for Citizen Access to Law

Subject

readability
legislation
legal informatics
corpus linguistics
machine learning
natural language processing
readability metrics
cloze testing
crowdsourcing
citizen science
artificial intelligence
natural language processing
legal informatics

Description

This papers sits at the intersection of citizen access to law, legal informatics and plain language. The paper reports the results of a joint project of the Cornell University Legal Information Institute and the Australian National University which collected thousands of crowdsourced assessments of the readability of law through the Cornell LII site. The aim of the project is to enhance accuracy in the prediction of the readability of legal sentences. The study requested readers on legislative pages of the LII site to rate passages from the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations and other texts for readability and other characteristics. The research provides insight into who uses legal rules and how they do so. The study enables conclusions to be drawn as to the current readability of law and spread of readability among legal rules. The research is intended to enable the creation of a dataset of legal rules labelled by human judges as to readability. Such a dataset, in combination with machine learning, will assist in identifying factors in legal language which impede readability and access for citizens. As far as we are aware, this research is the largest ever study of readability and usability of legal language and the first research which has applied crowdsourcing to such an investigation. The research is an example of the possibilities open for enhancing access to law through engagement of end users in the online legal publishing environment for enhancement of legal accessibility and through collaboration between legal publishers and researchers.

Creator

Curtotti, Michael
Weibel, Wayne
McCreath, Eric
Ceynowa, Nicolas
Frug, Sara
Bruce, Tom R

Source

Journal of Open Access to Law; Vol. 3 No. 1 (2015)
2372-7152

Publisher

Journal of Open Access to Law

Date

2015-03-23

Relation

Format

application/pdf

Language

eng

Type

info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed article

Identifier

Citation

Michael Curtotti et al., Citizen Science for Citizen Access to Law, Journal of Open Access to Law, 2015, accessed November 22, 2024, https://igi.indrastra.com/items/show/604

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