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
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 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
