Vol 36, No 2 (2019)

The paper examines the legal and political impact of the Covid-19 crisis, drawing the attention to fundamental questions on authority and political legitimacy, coercion and obligation, power and cooperation. National states and sovereign governments have had and still will have a crucial role in re-establishing the public health sector and addressing the colossal challenges of economic re-construction. Scholars have accordingly discussed the set of legal means displayed during this crisis: emergency decrees, lockdowns, travel bans, and generally speaking, powers of the state of exception. The aim of this paper is to stress the limits of such perspectives on powers of national governments and sovereigns, in order to illustrate what goes beyond such powers. Focus should be on the ontological, epistemic and normative constraints that affect today’s rights and duties of national states. Such constraints correspond to a class of problems that is complex, often transnational, and increasingly data-driven. In addition, we should not overlook the lessons learnt from such fields, as environmental law and internet governance, anti-terrorism and transnational business law, up to the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Such fields show that legal co-regulation and mechanisms of coordination and cooperation complement the traditional powers of national governments even in the times of the mother of all pandemics. The Covid-19 crisis has been often interpreted as if this were the last chapter of an on-going history about the Leviathan and its bio-powers. It is not. The crisis regards the end of the first chapter on the history of today’s information societies.

Electronic voting and counting are increasingly common and have been adopted in a number of Australian jurisdictions. Unfortunately, there is evidence that e-voting systems lack transparency. At present there are reasonable solutions for poll-site e-voting but none for remote paperless Internet voting. Although there are reasonable methods for statistical audits of electronically counted election results, Australian elections do not use them. The authors argue that a purposive approach should be taken to relevant electoral laws to ensure that genuine scrutiny of electronic electoral processes can be undertaken. This would require the source code and the voting data to be made available for testing. The authors recommend a number of legislative reforms to ensure the verifiability of e-voting. These reforms need to be undertaken to ensure that Australian elections are accurate, and consistent with the constitutional requirement of direct choice by electors.

In early 2018, an Inquiry into Youth Justice Centres in Victoria (Inquiry) found that a combination of a punitive approach to youth justice, inadequate crime strategies, and a lack of appropriately trained and experienced staff at youth justice centres, greatly contributed to the hindrance of the rehabilitation of young persons in detention in Victoria, Australia. In addition to identifying these challenges, the Inquiry also determined that the way in which young offenders have been described by politicians and portrayed in the media in recent times, has had a significant impact on shaping youth justice policies and practices. This article specifically examines the role of the media in the adultification of the Victorian youth justice system. It begins with a historical examination of youth justice, drawing on the welfare model and the justice model.  This is followed by a discussion of the perception and reality of youth offending in Victoria. Here, it is demonstrated that through framing, the media represents heightened levels of youth offending and suggests that only a ‘tough on crime’ approach can curb such offending; an approach that has been adopted by the Victorian State Government in recent years. Finally, the article considers how recent youth justice reforms are examples of adultification, and by not adequately distinguishing between a child and adult offender, these reforms are inconsistent with the best interests of the child.

Unlike thirty years ago, human rights issues are now routinely raised in Australian constitutional cases. In this article, the authors examine the role of the amicus curiae in the United States Supreme Court and consider how far and to what extent the amicus curiae device has been accepted in decisions of the High Court of Australia. The authors analyse the High Court’s treatment of applications for admissions as amici curiae, noting the divergent approaches taken by Chief Justice Brennan and Justice Kirby, and drawing attention to the practical difficulties faced by applicants who seek admission to make oral submissions. Human rights cases raise questions of minority rights that should not be adjudicated without input from those minorities. The authors recommend that Australia adopt the U.S. approach, to admit written submissions as a matter of course, and to allow applicants to make oral submissions when they have a serious and arguable point to make. This approach is consistent with the Court’s significant role of establishing legal policy norms for the entire nation, including for the identity groups that increasingly occupy the Court’s attention. The focus here is on Australia, but the argument for the role of amici is more general and might well apply to high courts elsewhere.

Australian law schools are tasked with forming students in their knowledge and understanding of the law, with many students aiming to fulfil their dreams of pursuing a legal career. Utilising Bourdieu’s conceptual tools, this article considers whether aspirations of being “real lawyers” are significantly influenced by motifs of career success predominantly linked to an “elite” tier of law practice. The attitudes and perceptions of law students can also positively or adversely shape their career path amidst the information at play in the law school space. Drawing on qualitative data, we have applied Bourdieu’s tools to understand undergraduate and practical legal training students’ responses to notions of career accomplishment. This is contrasted with the reflections of early career commercial lawyers about their law school experiences. With comparisons to contemporary surveys and research on student services for law students, along with their wellbeing, the article reasons that the assorted ambitions of law students requires a law school environment promoting a more diversified perspective of “real law” and “real lawyering”.

This paper presents the Knowledge Graph Usage framework, which allows the introduction of Knowledge Graph features to support Trust, Privacy, Transparency and Accountability concerns regarding the use of its contents by applications. A real-world example is presented and used to illustrate how the framework can be used. This article also shows how knowledge graphs can be linked to the elements of legal governance. Thus, it is an invitation to dialogue for legal and Law & Society scholars who might be interested in how the evolution of the web of data and computational sciences intersects with their own discipline.

Technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are affecting the legal profession. Machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) enable new legal apps that, to some extent, can analyze contracts, answer legal questions, or predict the outcome of a case or issue. While it is hard to predict the extent to which these techniques will change law practice, two things are certain: legal professionals will need to understand the new text analysis techniques and how to use and evaluate them, and law faculties face the question of how to teach law students the required skills and knowledge to do so. At the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, the authors have co-designed a semester-long course entitled, Applied Legal Data Analytics and AI, and twice taught it to combined groups of law students and students from technical departments. The course provides a hands-on practical introduction to applying ML and NLP to extract information from legal text data, the ways text analytics have been applied to support the work of legal professionals, researchers, and administrators, and the techniques for evaluating how well they work.

The article introduces the new text analytic techniques and briefly surveys law schools’ current efforts to incorporate instruction on computer programming and machine learning in legal education. Then it describes the 2020 version of the course, including the students, instructors, and course sessions in overview. We explain how we taught law students skills of programming and experimental design and engaged them in assignments that involve using Python programming environments to analyze legal data.

The course culminated in joint projects engaging small teams of law and technical students in applying machine learning and data analytics to legal problems. The article explains how the instructors prepare the students for the final course projects, beginning early in the term with project ideas and databases of text, forming teams, working on the projects as a team and obtaining interim feedback, and finally completing the projects and reporting results. We draw some salient comparisons between the 2019 and 2020 versions of the course and report what worked well and what did not, the students’ reactions, and lessons learned for future offerings of the course.