LegalGNN: Legal Information Enhanced Graph Neural Network for Recommendation

Recommendation in legal scenario (Legal-Rec) is a specialized recommendation task that aims to provide potential helpful legal documents for users. While there are mainly three differences compared with traditional recommendation: (1) Both the structural connections and textual contents of legal information are important in the Legal-Rec scenario, which means feature fusion is very important here. (2) Legal-Rec users prefer the newest legal cases (the latest legal interpretation and legal practice), which leads to a severe new-item problem. (3) Different from users in other scenarios, most Legal-Rec users are expert and domain-related users. They often concentrate on several topics and have more stable information needs. So it is important to accurately model user interests here. To the best of our knowledge, existing recommendation work cannot handle these challenges simultaneously. To address these challenges, we propose a legal information enhanced graph neural network–based recommendation framework (LegalGNN). First, a unified legal content and structure representation model is designed for feature fusion, where the Heterogeneous Legal Information Network (HLIN) is constructed to connect the structural features (e.g., knowledge graph) and contextual features (e.g., the content of legal documents) for training. Second, to model user interests, we incorporate the queries users issued in legal systems into the HLIN and link them with both retrieved documents and inquired users. This extra information is not only helpful for estimating user preferences, but also valuable for cold users/items (with less interaction history) in this scenario. Third, a graph neural network with relational attention mechanism is applied to make use of high-order connections in HLIN for Legal-Rec. Experimental results on a real-world legal dataset verify that LegalGNN outperforms several state-of-the-art methods significantly. As far as we know, LegalGNN is the first graph neural model for legal recommendation.

Legal Judgment Elements Extraction Approach with Law Article-aware Mechanism

Legal judgment elements extraction (LJEE) aims to identify the different judgment features from the fact description in legal documents automatically, which helps to improve the accuracy and interpretability of the judgment results. In real court rulings, judges usually need to scan both the fact descriptions and the law articles repeatedly to find out the relevant information, and it is hard to acquire the key judgment features quickly, so legal judgment elements extraction is a crucial and challenging task for legal judgment prediction. However, most existing methods follow the text classification framework, which fails to model the attentive relations of the law articles and the legal judgment elements. To address this issue, we simulate the working process of human judges, and propose a legal judgment elements extraction method with a law article-aware mechanism, which captures the complex semantic correlations of the law article and the legal judgment elements. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves significant improvements than other state-of-the-art baselines on the element recognition task dataset. Compared with the BERT-CNN model, the proposed “All labels Law Articles Embedding Model (ALEM)” improves the accuracy, recall, and F1 value by 0.5, 1.4 and 1.0, respectively.

Divisible Governance: Making Gas-fired Futures during Climate Collapse in Northern Australia

Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous ecological effects, new fossil fuel extraction projects continue apace, further entrenching fossil fuel dependence, and thereby enacting particular climate futures. In this article, we examine how this is occurring in the case of a proposed onshore shale gas “fracking” industry in the remote Northern Territory of Australia, drawing on policy and legal documents and interviews with an enunciatory community of scientists, lawyers, activists, and policy makers to illustrate what we call “divisible governance.” Divisible governance—enacted through technical maneuvers of temporal and jurisdictional risk fragmentation—not only facilitates the piecemeal entrenchment of unsustainable extraction but also sustains ignorance on the part of this enunciatory community and the wider public about the impacts of such extraction and the manner in which it is both facilitated and regulated. Such governance regimes, we suggest, create felicitous conditions for governments to defer, forestall, or eliminate their accountability while regulating their way further and further into catastrophic climate change. Countering divisible governance begins, we suggest, by mapping the connections that it fragments.

Technolegal Expulsions: Platform Food Delivery Workers and Work Regulations in Colombia

Precariousness of the Colombian urban economy provides an ecosystem for the development and expansion of digital platforms, intersecting informal working relations with digital surveillance. Reconstructing legal obstacles to gaining recognition as legal and formal workers, it is argued that platforms have assembled a techno-legal network which translates discussions about workers’ rights into the less regulated arena of information and communication technologies. The role of ‘regulatory displacement’ is examined to analyse the evolution of digital platforms for food delivery workers. Drawing on a review of the regulation of it and labour, discussed in Congress in 2017–2018, we explore the regulatory expulsions that digital workers experience, analysing this information with a grounded theory approach, in which we have followed discursive patterns that emerge from legal documents. Addressing this strategic use of the law is key to understanding and overcoming obstacles that platform workers face in their attempts to organize in the Global South.

A Redacted America: Critiquing the Lack of Transparency at Guantanamo Bay

The willingness to undermine liberal standards of justice and imprisonment has been a major criticism of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The camp’s propensity to evade judicial mechanisms offered on American soil is particularly due to its deliberate opacity. This paper begins with a brief overview of the major arguments in favour of the closure of the facility and the challenges that have prohibited the closure thus far, based on a review of debates and commentary found in investigative reports, legal documents, and scholarly analyses. A substantive portion of this piece will highlight three demonstrable areas where transparency is being detrimentally avoided in the conduct of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp: press access, health care, and the detainee defense counsel. A critique of increasing transparency as a possible impetus to keep the facility open will close the discussion. Ultimately, the transgressions of Guantánamo are so detrimental to American self-conception of liberal values that a correction of the facility’s opacity should be but an intermediary step to closing the facility entirely.

The Guzmán’s of Mendoza - acclaimed classical musicians

During the 19th century in Chile and for three generations, the Guzmán’s were acclaimed classical musicians. The literature indicates that their patriarch Fernando Guzmán and his son Francisco arrived in Chile from Mendoza, Argentina in about 1822. There is little or no information regarding their heritage, origins and the correct composition of their large family. There are many errors and assumptions in the literature as to the number and paternity of several of them; it is intended to correct the misinformation and provide documentary evidence of the family origins, heritage and composition. The research makes use of the Mendoza Baptisms, Marriages and Deaths Parish Books from the 18th and 19th centuries, legal documents, and published material. It is confirmed that Fernando Guzmán was born into slavery, one of five children of Maria Juana, an African slave owned by the Santo Domingo Convent of Mendoza. Fernando married Juana Agustina, also a slave of African descent, owned by the Molina Sotomayor family. Fernando and Juana Agustina had 13 children, several of whom were also born into slavery. The Guzmán’s were a family of classical musicians par excellence. To celebrate their life and work, this research identifies and reports how the family was composed and how it evolved.

Evolution of the Kandyan Vina of Sri Lanka with Special Reference to the Contemporary Usage

The string instrument, the Kandyan vina (Uḍaraṭa Vīṇā), once portrayed in the book by John Davy as “Venah”, shares close resemblance with the Coconut shell fiddle instruments in India, in terms of their inherent form, structure, cultural peculiarities and playing posture. Such similarities serve to confirm that the prototypic musical instrument – the Kandyan vina, originated from the Coconut shell fiddle instruments of India. According to sources, the prototype instrument of the Kandyan vina arrived with the gypsy groups who migrated to Sri Lanka from Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu during the Kandy period of 1600-1750 AD. Since then, until 1980-1990 AD, the prototype instrument was developed by the influence of the Western musical instruments and musical intelligence, available material, creative methods inherent in the aristocratic, villagers, beggars, Veddas, and gypsy communities. Therefore, the rise of the Kandyan vina is proven to have originated within Sri Lanka as a unique native string instrument. Research objectives of this study are: firstly, to re-introduce a native string instrument according to its true historic trails; secondly, a modern Kandyan vina is constructed using the modified knowledge discovered through exploring the ancient Kandyan vina instruments; and thirdly, to assimilate knowledge of a musical instrument based on its historical literature and archaeological data from an Archaeomusicological perspective. With this in mind, Frescoes/murals, artefacts, legal documents and primary books were used as the primary sources, while journal articles and secondary books were used as secondary sources.

Legal Urgency on Designing The Legislation for The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Indonesian Medical Practice

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers the potential for a great improvement in patient care, both in diagnose and disease treatment, and a consequential reduction in healthcare costs, a part of opportunities and challenge are ahead. The use of AI in medicine was significantly developed in some countries. Indonesia as a modern country also has a great change in promoting the use of AI. The study aims to propose on designing the legislation for the use of AI in Indonesian medical practices. The method used in this research is normative juridical approaches with descriptive analysis. The data used are primary legal material namely the Indonesian Penal Code and Law No. 36 of 2009 on Health Law. Meanwhile, the secondary legal material used are books, journals, and other legal documents. The results show that designing the new legislation as the guidance and basis for the use of AI shall give a good impact on the development of health services as practices among other countries. Moreover, Health Act 2009 clearly supported the use of advance technology’s product in medicine. Yet, the application of AI facilitates interpretation follows with high accuracy and speed for medical diagnoses.

An Assessment of methods and techniques used in Forensic Linguistics

The following paper aimed to evaluate the techniques and methods adopted in forensic linguistics. The paper is divided to 5 sections the first section discussed a brief background of the topic while the second chapter aimed to review literature from previous studies. The third section depicted the methods and techniques incorporated in carrying out this research. The fourth section analysed the data gathered for this paper while the last section concluded the paper. It is seen in this research that Courtroom speech, courtroom translation and interpretation, comprehensibility of texts and legal documents, including police cautions issued to offenders or suspects, and the use of linguistic evidence in court procedures are all part of forensic linguistics.

Obstacles and Solutions to Enforcement of Hudud in Shariah Courts in Northern Nigeria

This research aims to study the obstacles and solutions related to the application of hudud in Sharia courts in northern Nigeria; This is due to the presence of many problems when applying the hudud in Sharia courts, such as the conflict between the Federal Constitution and the Constitution of the States, especially with regard to the application of the had for theft. The researcher studied the Shariah hudud in general in terms of defining them linguistically and legally, with mentioning their types, while addressing the practical application of Shariah hudud in the Shariah courts in some northern states that were chosen as a model, these states are: Zamfara, Jigawa, Kan, Kaduna, Katsina and Bauchi states.The researcher also touched on the legal system and courts in Nigeria in general and the legal system and Sharia courts in northern Nigeria in particular, and the Islamic penal laws of the states of Zamfara, Kanbuchi and Jigawa were also discussed. The researcher used two scientific research methodologies, including: the inductive theoretical method; where he studied the subject of borders in general and the hudud of theft, especially in jurisprudence blogs, in addition to books, studies, letters, scientific articles, reports and legal documents that were written in this field and stored in libraries, websites and other sources of information. The researcher also used the applied analytical method; Where he studied the issues related to the hudud that were applied in the Sharia courts in northern Nigeria, especially with regard to the hudud of theft, and the study of the obstacles in the application of these hudud in order to find appropriate solutions to them. The researcher reached a number of results, including that Islamic Sharia is the optimal system that should be applied to obtain permanent happiness in this world and the hereafter. The application of legal borders effectively contributes to the elimination of crimes committed and prevalent in Nigerian society, especially in the northern regions. Among the findings of the research, the compatibility of Islamic criminal law with Islamic jurisprudence in most aspects, and the compatibility of the applications of Sharia courts with Islamic law in many cases. The researcher recommends the officials to carry out all the solutions mentioned in the study so that they can better apply the Sharia and implement the Sharia hudud. He also recommends to them the necessity of developing Islamic criminal law to be fully compatible with Islamic law, and the necessity of implementing all judgments issued by Sharia courts.