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Daily Archives: August 24, 2021

Machines Learning the Rule of Law – EU Proposes the World’s first Artificial Intelligence Act

Via LLRXMachines Learning the Rule of Law – EU Proposes the World’s first Artificial Intelligence Act – Sümeyye Elif Biber is a PhD Candidate in Law and Technology at the Scuola Sant’Anna in Pisa. In 21 April 2021, the European Commission (EC) proposed the world’s first Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). The proposal has received a warm welcome across the EU as well as from the US, as it includes substantial legal provisions on ethical standards. After its release, the media’s main focus laid on the proposal’s “Brussels Effect”, which refers to the EU’s global regulatory influence: EU laws exceed their “local” influence and become global standards. With the AIA, the EU has the potential to become the world’s “super-regulator” on AI. More than the Brussels Effect, however, the emphasis should lie on the EU’s intention to explicitly protect the rule of law against the “rule of technology”. Despite this expressed goal, the normative power of the regulation to ensure the protection of the rule of law seems inadequate and raises serious concerns from the perspective of fundamental rights protection. This shortcoming becomes most evident across three main aspects of the AIA, namely in the regulation’s definition of AI systems, the AI practices it prohibits, and the preeminence of a risk-based approach.

Teaching Lawyers to Think Like Leaders: The Next Big Shift in Legal Education

Barton, April M., Teaching Lawyers to Think Like Leaders: The Next Big Shift in Legal Education (May 26, 2021). Duquesne University School of Law Research Paper (No. 2021-02), Baylor Law Review, Vol. 73, No. 1, 2021, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3891019 “The old saying is that students go to law school to learn to think like… Continue Reading

Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge

OCLC Research: “The vision statement of the Wikimedia Foundation states, “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” Libraries need not see Wikipedia as competition; rather, failing to leverage its omnipresence in the online world constitutes a missed opportunity. As a senior program officer at… Continue Reading

AALL 2021 Annual Meeting Program Recap – Brief Analyzers: The Next Level of Bots Doing Legal Research

FCILSIS Blog – By Jennifer Allison – Description of the program, provided by the presenters: Legal research vendors have taken new steps to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning in their products. The latest development is brief analysis tools that read a document and formulate searches with little to no additional human input. This session… Continue Reading

2021 National Book Festival

Library of Congress: “Create your National Book Festival experience with the Library of Congress in 2021 by engaging in author conversations online, watching the broadcast special on PBS, listening to NPR podcasts, tuning in to Washington Post Live author interviews and attending a ticketed event at the Library. Join us for an expanded Festival, Sept.… Continue Reading

GPO Makes Available Statute Compilations in USLM XML Format

“The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) and its legislative data partners in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate have made Statute Compilations available in USLM XML format. This new format makes documents easier to use, read, and download. The public can access the compilations on GPO’s trusted digital repository govinfo, the one-stop… Continue Reading

FBI sends its first-ever alert about a ‘ransomware affiliate’

The Record: “The US Federal Bureau of Investigations has published today its first-ever public advisory detailing the modus operandi of a “ransomware affiliate.” A relatively new term, a ransomware affiliate refers to a person or group who rents access to Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) platforms, orchestrates intrusions into corporate networks, encrypt files with the “rented ransomware,” and… Continue Reading

The farmers market is moving online

The Verge: “The pandemic brought rampant growth for local food distribution platforms…the pandemic came, and it hit farms hard. Supply chains, customer bases, and in some cases labor were upended. Small and medium-sized independent farms that relied on restaurant wholesale lost huge percentages of their business overnight. Some local CSAs folded. Some farming operations went… Continue Reading

How Americans feel about ‘cancel culture’ and offensive speech in 6 charts

Pew: “Americans have long debated the boundaries of free speech, from what is and isn’t protected by the First Amendment to discussions about “political correctness” and, more recently, “cancel culture.” The internet has amplified these debates and fostered new questions about tone and tenor in recent years. Here’s a look at how adults in the… Continue Reading

Black Craftspeople Digital Archive

“Discovering • Interpreting • Digitizing From 1619 to beyond, Black craftspeople, both free and enslaved, worked to produce the valued architecture, handcrafts, and decorative arts of the American South. The Black Craftspeople Digital Archive seeks to enhance what we know about Black craftspeople by telling both a spatial story and a historically informed story that… Continue Reading