The 16th Annual International Conference on Legal Information Systems, or JURIX 2003, will be held December 11-12 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In conjunction, a call for participation has been issued by the Liebniz Center for Law for a one-day "International Workshop on the Development of Standards for Describing Legal Documents". The conference will profile Italian, Swiss and Dutch efforts in this area. There are several international legal standardization bodies at work on XML markup standards for legal information, including MetaLex (which has produced version 1.0 of a language independent markup standard) and LexML.

Continuing to grapple with the electronic release of confidential information in court files, courts in Florida and New Hampshire have recently taken action on the recommendation of study committees in this area. [I'm obliged to beSpacific for the link.] One of the issues faced by courts that release bulk data to the information industry is the downstream effect of erroneous information in the bulk set, as well as subsequent changes to the data. For example, how are expungements and pardons handled? What about erroneous entries? What damages flow from erroneous or private data released to an outside source? One aspect of the issue -- whether damages are available under the Privacy Act for governmental release of private information where no actual damages are proven -- will be considered at oral argument tomorrow before the US Supreme Court in the case of Doe v. Chao [Docket | Briefs]. Wired News has this report.

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