Microjustice Initiative Launched

I have posted previously about the cutting edge and entrepreneurial 'microjustice' concept. Earlier this year, ILA (International Legal Alliances, which spearheaded micorjustice under founder Patricia van Nispen), launched a pilot in Bolivia. The aim is to develop methodologies and show proof-of-concept. It also aims to develop manuals, policies and other tools that can be adapted in other countries. (Update: Microjustice Bolivia now has a web presence at www.microjusticiabolivia.org.)

In light of the recent momentum gaining around the UN's MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) and the related concept of  'legal empowerment of the poor' (which I am following and is a Category of this blog), Microjuctice fits nicely as a subset of a subset. It seems that there is more and more frustration with the typical 'court/legal' reform project, and we are looking for alternative solutions. Microjustice not only is alternative, it is incredibly innovative . It does not seem to purport to 'save the world', just to address a gap that ILA thinks is missing in the law and development sector. Compared to the bigger players in the field, I like and respect this humble approach. At this stage, ILA makes no claim other than "This seems to be a possible alternative solution, and here are the supporting reasons so you know we're not just riding on fads. So let's try it out. If it works, let's adapt it!'. Very smooth. 

Materials available for Future of Legal Education Conference

Webcasts of conference sessions are now available along with abstracts, papers, and powerpoint presentations for the International Conference on the Future of Legal Education, of the Georgia State College of Law, held 20-23 Feb. I am looking forward to examining the materials to see if we might be able to apply any features to the project design for educating new lawyers in Afghanistan.



Official Announcement:


"The conference took as its point of departure a highly critical report on American legal education recently issued by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching:Educating Lawyers. The report calls for fundamental changes in both the structure and content of legal education in the United States to integrate realistic and real-life lawyering experiences throughout the curriculum, and challenges American law schools to produce lawyers who are not only smart problem-solvers but also responsible professionals committed to service of both clients and the larger society. The conference brought together leading legal educators from both the United States and other countries with leaders from the legal profession.


Two questions were asked:

 First, if one was charged with starting a new law school, how would one implement the Carnegie recommendations? What would the budget look like? How would the faculty be recruited and structured? What would one want the student body to look like? What would be the curriculum?

 Second, how would an existing law school transform itself into the kind of law school envisioned by the Carnegie Report? What would a 5 year transition plan look like?

Open Web Standards for Legal Informtics (with a focus on legislative documents)

"Working Paper 2: Legal Informatics and Management of Legislative Documents” commissioned by the Global Centre in preparation for the World e-Parliament Report 2008, aims at providing an overview of the state of the art and of the prospects of the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the legislative domain, in particular concerning the management of legislative documents. The paper introduces the concepts of legal informatics and legislative informatics, describes the evolution of the ICT-based management of legislative documents and identifies and evaluates emergent approaches, focusing on those based on open standards.

Linkedin Group for Microjustice

Jin Ho Verdonschot of Tilburg Univeristy (secifically TISCO - Tilburg Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Civil Law and Conflict Resolution Systems) has started a LinkedIn Group for the Microjustice Initiative. 

(UPDATE 4/2009- A year after this last post, Maaike de Langen, policy specialist on legal empowerment of the poor for the United Nations Development Program, created the 'Legal Empowerment Early Adopters' LinkedIn Group. )


(UPDATE 10/2009 See my recent post on the newly created Ning Group for Legal Empowerment of the Poor, created by UNDP Asia Regional Office in Bangkok. Reflective of... NGO coordination!)

Linkedin Group for Microjustice

Jin Ho Verdonschot of Tilburg Univeristy (secifically TISCO - Tilburg Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Civil Law and Conflict Resolution Systems) has started a LinkedIn Group for the Microjustice Initiative. 

(UPDATE 4/2009- A year after this last post, Maaike de Langen, policy specialist on legal empowerment of the poor for the United Nations Development Program, created the 'Legal Empowerment Early Adopters' LinkedIn Group. )

A short history of legal informatics

In reviewing the Parliament Working Paper No. 2 (by Global Centre for ICT), which is an excellent paper in itself, I came across a good and short history of legal informatics- the use of ICT to process and support legal information and activities. I am reproducing and adapting this part of the paper here:

Legal informatics is the discipline which deals with the use of ICT to process legal information and support legal activities, namely, the creation, the cognition and the application of the law. As automatic processing of information has been expanding from mathematics calculations to data management, office automation, telecommunications and the global knowledge infrastructure, the domain of legal informatics has been consequently expanding.
Historical evolution:

• The first realization of legislative informatics goes back to the 1960’s when the first databases of legal documents were started. 

• The 1970’s saw the growth of informatics within the public administration, where large databases where constructed with various administrative data (e.g. population data, fiscal data,etc.)

• The 1980’s were the time of the personal computer, which enabled the decentralized use of information technology by individual users. This was the era of office automation, when computers entered most legal and administrative offices (both in the public and the private domain), accompanied by suites of user-friendly applications (though the use of information technologies was generally limited to mundane applications limited to a single user, like text processing, archiving data, using databases).

• The 1990’s were characterized by the creation of computerized information systems for supporting the activities of many legal organizations, which lead to the integration of the so far separate applications. At this time, in general, automation within legal organizations (parliaments, judiciaries, public administrations) started being conceived as an integrated enterprise. The introduction of ICT within legal bodies ceased to consists in the mere provision of new tools (leaving the existing procedures unchanged); it has become the occasion for reengineering processes according to the potentialities of ICT-based information systems, for rationalizing workflows of enhancing the capabilities of the concerned organization. At the same time legal informatics has started to adopt (and to contribute to) advanced techniques for managing legal information. Analyses of legal reasoning and knowledge developed within legal informatics have proved very useful for legal theory in areas such as legal reasoning and the modeling of norms and normative concepts. On the other hand models developed within legal informatics have been used within computing and in particular within artificial intelligence, in areas such as belief revision or defensible reasoning (Prakken and Sartor 1997).

• Between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s legal informatics has increased its impact on management and integration of processes concerning production and application of law. Profiting from the opportunities of the Internet, it has expanded its scope to the communications between legal organizations and their public, namely citizens, economic units, and their consultants (lawyers, accountants, etc.). In this way, it has become a significant aspect and an important resource of e-government, which in general terms may be viewed as the public sector’s use of ICT with the aim of improving information and service delivery, encouraging participation and making government more accountable, transparent and effective. 

• Now: As the law is at the core of governance, legal informatics is, therefore, now at the core of egovernance. Its applications span from the legislative domain to the judiciary, to administration, to legal professionals. In all of these areas the use of ICT can contribute to the efficiency of legal processes and to their rationalization, as well as to the realization of legal values such as transparency and controllability (by providing information about legal processes), reasoned deliberation (enhancing the possibility of engaging in informed and reasoned debate), democracy (providing all citizens with information about social problems and their legislative and legal treatment, and new way to discuss such problems and to interact with representative bodies and with their members).

Paper- the concept of Microjustice

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1022936

Abstract:  

In this essay, we introduce the concept of Microjustice as an approach to tackle the problem of access to justice for those with limited resources. In addition to existing perspectives, we propose to analyze the justice sector as a 'market' with its corresponding chain of supply and a demand. The challenge is to develop processes that are affordable to users with limited resources, whilst making it attractive for the providers of justice to act as suppliers. Microjustice allows the demand for justice and the supply of justice to meet by using tools of the modern services economy: information technology, economies of scale, cheaper labor at the place of delivery, flexible adjustment to local circumstances, self-help and empowerment of the user. The analogy to microfinance is instructive. 

We first explore how the market for justice works and why justice does not reach the poor. Next, we proceed to the development principles for Microjustice, drawing on the work of Prahalad and Hart regarding markets at the 'Bottom of the Pyramid.' We also show that legal systems are surrounded by knowledge that has an enormous potential for innovation, but are not yet open enough to use this potential. We give some examples of how Microjustice could look like in practice. Then we investigate the limitations of the market perspective and possible other objections to the Microjustice approach. We conclude by inviting the legal sector service providers, NGO's and other institutions working on access to rights to consider the development of innovative services in the spirit of microjustice. Moreover, we urge governments and donors to think about access to justice programs in terms of creating a climate for innovation and a business climate that stimulates legal service providers to deliver their services at the bottom of the pyramid.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 31

Keywords: access to justice, legal services

JEL Classifications: D63, D73, D74, K41, K42, O17, O31

Working Paper Series

Maurits Barendrecht 

Tilburg Law School; Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC)

Patricia Van Nispen 

International Legal Alliances

February 1, 2008

TILEC Discussion Paper No. 2008-010