Pocket Justice – An App for Your IPhone / IPod Touch

Jerry Goldman (Northwestern/ Oyez Project) has recently released a great app for those wanting to quickly access SCOTUS case summaries and/or audio recordings from their Iphones.  The top 100 constitutional law cases are made available for free–thanks to the good folks at Justia.  Those looking for the full 600+ cases can access them for the low price of $4.99.

Here is the complete description – “PocketJustice brings the U.S. Supreme Court down to earth through abstracts of the Court’s constitutional decisions and access to its public sessions. The application includes voting alignments and biographical sketches for all justices. PocketJustice harnesses recordings of the Court’s public proceedings to deliver hundreds of hours of oral arguments and opinion announcements. In many of these cases, PocketJustice provides synchronized, searchable transcripts identifying all speakers. This version offers information and audio for the top 100 constitutional law cases. The complete version ($ 4.99) provides information and audio for all 600+ constitutional law cases in the Supreme Court canon.”

Community Structure in Time-Dependent, Multiscale and Multiplex Networks [ Via Science ]

This morning I participated in the first set panels at the Duke Political Networks Conference.  Our panel was entitled “Dynamic Networks.”  On the panel was Peter Mucha from UNC-Math, who presented Community Structure in Time-Dependent, Multiscale, and Multiplex Networks [Mucha, Richardson, Macon, Porter, Onnela].

Suffice to say, this is a very exciting paper.   Indeed, the paper is in this week’s edition of Science Magazine.  The article fills an important hole in the broader literature and I believe the approach outlined therein will be adopted by many scholars.

Here is the abstract: “Network science is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with methods and applications drawn from across the natural, social, and information sciences. A prominent problem in network science is the algorithmic detection of tightly connected groups of nodes known as communities. We developed a generalized framework of network quality functions that allowed us to study the community structure of arbitrary multislice networks, which are combinations of individual networks coupled through links that connect each node in one network slice to itself in other slices. This framework allows studies of community structure in a general setting encompassing networks that evolve over time, have multiple types of links (multiplexity), and have multiple scales.”

Computational Legal Studies – The Interactive Gallery

Click on the above picture and you will be taken to the Interactive Gallery of Computational Legal Studies. Once inside the gallery, click on any thumbnail to see the full size image. Each image features a link to supporting materials such as documentation and/or the underlying academic paper. We hope to add more content to gallery over the coming weeks and months — so please check back!  Please note that load time may vary depending upon your connection, machine, etc.

Computational Legal Studies Presentation Slides from the Law.gov Meetings

Thanks to Carl Malamud and the good folks at the University of Colorado Law School and University of Texas Law School for allowing us to participate in their respective law.gov meetings. For those interested in governmental transparency, we believe that Carl Malamud’s on-going national conversation is very important. The video above represents a fixed spaced movie combining the majority of the slides we presented at the two meetings. If the video will not load, click here to access the YouTube Version of the Slides. Enjoy!