Response to Thoughts On….

I was going to post this on Adam Shell’s blog in response to his post Parlez-vous anglais ? Sprechen Sie Englisch? Вы говорите английскую язык? Μιλάτε τα αγγλικά; (it’s about the limitations of legal rule systems that are created in english for use in non-english speaking contexts – go read it – I’ll still be here when you get back. No really, go) If you click on the link to try and post a response, you’re whisked off to some magical 400 Bad Request Error land – same goes for when you click on the link to his post (the full title) that I’ve included above – I’m guessing this is caused by Adam’s use of non-english characters in his title not playing nicely with the html code generated for the link by WordPress.

This is a good example of a difficulty that may be experienced in trying to port an expert legal system to another language, which leads me to the point I was going to make on Adam’s blog; In Canada, by virtue of our two official languages, we are faced with a situation whereby legislation is created in both english and french, neither one is viewed as paramount over the other, and each is to be interpreted in light of the other. We call this the equal authenticity rule (by we I mean me and Supreme Court Justice Basterache) and it means that any expert legal system would need to account for both the english and french meanings of legislation and how they alter each other’s prima facie meaning. If you don’t speak more than one language it may not be immediately apparent that it is impossible to create a document in two languages that is literally the same. Some words exist in one language that simply do not in another. (a simple example of this is the french version of the word goodbye, ‘au revoir’, does not mean goodbye, it means literally ‘to re-see’ kind of a french ‘until we meet again’) In this light, it seems that it would be quite difficult to implement an expert legal system that is bilingual and deals with two versions of a single piece of legislation. An expert legal system niche feature that would be pretty useful in this context, however, might be one that identified incongruencies between the two versions of legislation relating to any case you’re working on.

Blog Trials are coming

At least to South Korea.  Kim Tong-hyung of the Korea Times reported back in April of this year that:

Weblogs, or Internet diaries, are about to gain more than just curious readers. Korean courts are now experimenting whether they could operate court trials and hearings just through Internet postings, saving everybody the trouble of actually entering the courtroom.

The Seoul Administration Court recently designated one of its court units, which rules on labor-management relations and industrial accidents, to develop a prototype model for Internet-based trial models by the end of this month.

Although the court has not yet decided on a detailed framework, it plans to allow the parties in lawsuits to submit their list of evidence, legal documents and other data on Weblogs or Internet message boards to be operated by the court. The court decisions will also be announced online.

The court also plans to allow people to buy court documents and other requirements in preparing for their lawsuits through the Internet by credit card or mobile-phone payments.

Korea has one of the largest Internet populations in the world, with the penetration rate reaching over 70 percent. (see the rest of the article here)

This isn’t new news, (is news news if it isn’t new?) but ties in nicely with the topics covered in Our class last Saturday. I tell ya, blogging is going to be an essential part of our jobs, better get used to it. Someday soon, after a rough day in blog court, you and I will have to hook up for a quick virtual drink in the Lawbby.