Legal information retrieval (IR) is a form of professional search often associated with high recall. Information seeking in this context can consist of a single query with no clicks (known as... Show moreLegal information retrieval (IR) is a form of professional search often associated with high recall. Information seeking in this context can consist of a single query with no clicks (known as updating behaviour), a literature review where a complex boolean query crafted over several iterations is performed and all documents returned are inspected, or a seeking task spanning days or weeks, consisting of multiple queries interleaved with other tasks. Analysis of query logs is paramount to the improvement of current legal IR systems, and in particular of the system we are associated with, the Dutch Legal Intelligence IR system. This analysis however requires the ability to automatically identify which queries of a user are related to the same search goal — or in other words, related to the same search task. The current practice of defining sessions — a set of user interactions with the IR system with no more than 30 minutes between user actions — and equating a session to representing a search task, might prove ineffective given the characteristics of this user group.In this paper we provide an initial analysis of a sub-set of the query log from the Dutch Legal Intelligence IR system, comprising of 970 queries issued by 10 users within the space of 1 year. From this query log, we used the 30-minutes heuristic to define sessions, and extract 126 sessions, ranging from 1 to 71 sessions per user. We then independently annotate the query log to manually identify search tasks: this activity leads to the identification of 55 tasks, ranging from 1 to 21 tasks per user. In doing this, we highlight how the currently employed heuristic is not adequate to extract search queries from a user that are related to the same search task. We also show why tasks are more informative than sessions with regards to legal information retrieval. We further describe the potential of using characteristics such as Levenshtein distance, common words and string matching for automated task classification. Show less
Land registration has a magnetic appeal to politicians, state officials, and practitioners. The objective of this paper is, in dialogue with the other papers of this special volume, to highlight... Show moreLand registration has a magnetic appeal to politicians, state officials, and practitioners. The objective of this paper is, in dialogue with the other papers of this special volume, to highlight some of the main assumptions and misconceptions on which land registration programs are often developed, the problems that they cause if not carefully implemented, and the conditions in which they can actually improve people’s lives. This paper, based on my doctoral research (2020), does not aim to be a comprehensive literature review on existingknowledge regarding land registration nor an analysis of land registration in Timor-Leste, but aims instead to highlight a number of key authors and ideas on land registration that can contribute to the dialogue about this topic in Timor-Leste. Show less
Staalduinen, J.H. van; Tetteroo, J.; Gawehns, D.; Baratchi, M. 2021
How do we make sure that all citizens in a city have access to enough green space? An increasing part of the world’s population lives in urban areas, where contact with nature is largely reduced to... Show moreHow do we make sure that all citizens in a city have access to enough green space? An increasing part of the world’s population lives in urban areas, where contact with nature is largely reduced to street trees and parks. As optional tree planting sites and financial resources are limited, determining the best planting site can be formulated as an optimization problem with constraints. Can we locate these sites based on the popularity of nearby venues? How can we ensure that we include groups of people who tend to spend time in tree deprived areas?Currently, tree location sites are chosen based on criteria from spatial-visual, physical and biological, and functional categories. As these criteria do not give any insights into which citizens are benefiting from the tree placement, we propose new data-driven tree planting policies that take socio-cultural aspects as represented by the citizens’ behavior into account. We combine a Location Based Social Network (LBSN) mobility data set with tree location data sets, both of New York City and Paris, as a case study. The effect of four different policies is evaluated on simulated movement data and assessed on the average, overall exposure to trees as well as on how much inequality in tree exposure is mitigated. Show less
The aim of this contribution is to analyse what these strong expectations by EPSU are based on. Did the EU indeed create institutional settings that justify those expectations and, consequently,... Show moreThe aim of this contribution is to analyse what these strong expectations by EPSU are based on. Did the EU indeed create institutional settings that justify those expectations and, consequently, did the Commission break the “promise”? Moreover, what narratives have coloured these institutional settings and to what extent has this contributed to such expectations? Three obvious narratives can be distinguished. The first narrative relates to the establishment of the social dialogue in historical perspective starting with the Val Duchesse meetings. The second narrative follows the regulatory developments in the field of EU social policy in general, with an emphasis of the roles of the Commission and Social Dialogue in those regulatory mechanisms. This is based on a review of a selected number of key documents dealing with, among others, EU social policy. The third narrative follows the perception of the social dialogue in the doctrine, especially in handbooks on EU labour law. These narratives together have created a kind of epistemic community about how to understand Social Dialogue in general and the relationship between Social Partners and the Commission. Understanding these narratives is important for any contextual as well as teleological interpretation of Articles 154 and 155 TFEU. Furthermore, combined these narratives may also provide insight in why there is apparently a gap between the expectations, of at least EPSU, and the practice that the indication of “broken promise” is given. Show less
This paper examines citations in legal information retrieval. Citation metrics can be a factor of relevance in the ranking algorithms of legal information retrieval systems. We provide an overview... Show moreThis paper examines citations in legal information retrieval. Citation metrics can be a factor of relevance in the ranking algorithms of legal information retrieval systems. We provide an overview of the Dutch legal publishing culture. To analyze citations in legal publications, we manually analyze a set of documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited: document type, intended audience of documents, actual audience of documents and author affiliations. An analysis of 9 cited documents and 217 citing documents shows no strict separation in citations between documents aimed at scholars and documents aimed at practitioners. Our results suggest that citations in legal documents do not measure the impact on scholarly publications and scholars, but measure a broader scope of impact, or relevance, for the legal field. Show less
The interaction of multiple actors if European Border and Coast Guard Operations leads to a nexus of responsibilities, both individual and collective, positive and negative, direct or indirect,... Show moreThe interaction of multiple actors if European Border and Coast Guard Operations leads to a nexus of responsibilities, both individual and collective, positive and negative, direct or indirect, that is hard to disentangle. The connections between the responsibility of member states and that of the agency often lead to a non-singular answer to the question of the one responsible, which is not accommodated by the existing paradigm of legal accountability. Thus, this paper suggests a different approach to accountability, named ‘systemic accountability’, arguing from the perspective of justice, the rule of law, and strategic litigation. Show less
The main topic of this contribution is how privacy rights influence the exercise of freedom of expression. The contribution has three components. The first part of this contribution discusses the... Show moreThe main topic of this contribution is how privacy rights influence the exercise of freedom of expression. The contribution has three components. The first part of this contribution discusses the development of privacy rights from ‘the right to be left alone’ to the ‘the right to decide what information is shared’. This changing conception is related to freedom of expression rights. The author draws from Arendt, Foucault, and Mill to discuss this development. The second part consists of a short exposition of Dutch (constitutional and criminal) law. In this exposition, the author focusses on the constitutional freedom of expression and the criminal articles regulating publishers and pressers. In the third part, constitutional and criminal law developments for publishers and pressers are compared to the same laws for internet intermediaries. The author argues that for internet intermediaries the focus is not on safeguarding freedom of expression rights but on privacy rights. Under the influence of the internet and the privacy regulation from the European Union, the author shows that informational privacy rights have a negative impact on freedom of expression rights. The growth of privacy rights manifests itself in an increasing responsibility for intermediaries to censor content, while the individual responsibility (both in moral and legal variety) to engage in the public debate decreases. Show less
