Graham Greenleaf

Asian data privacy laws : trade and human rights perspectives

PART I: ASIA AND INTERNATIONAL DATA PRIVACY STANDARDS PART II: NATIONAL DATA PRIVACY LAWS IN ASIA PART III: COMPARISON STANDARDS, AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

Representing and using legal knowledge in integrated decision support systems: DataLex WorkStations

There is more to legal knowledge representation than knowledge-bases. It is valuable to look at legal knowledge representation and its implementation across the entire domain of ‘computerisation of law’, rather than focussing on sub-domains such as ‘legal expert systems’. The DataLex WorkStation software and applications developed using it are used to provide examples. Effective integration of inferencing, hypertext and text retrieval can overcome some of the limitations of these current paradigms of legal computerisation which are apparent when they are used on a ‘stand-alone’ basis. Effective integration of inferencing systems is facilitated by use of a (quasi) natural language knowledge representation, and the benefits of isomorphism are enhanced. These advantages of integration apply to all forms of inferencing, including document generation and casebased inferencing. Some principles for development of integrated legal decision support systems are proposed.

More than wysh ful thinking: AustLII's legal inferencing via the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web presents new challenges for the development of legal inferencing systems. This project starts by implementing via the web the inferencing component of the previous ‘DataLex’ research, through the wysh interface. This provides one solution to the problem of maintaining state in web interactions, while only requiring standard HTML and CGI facilities. Wysh knowledge bases can interact with other wysh knowledge bases located anywhere on the web, creating opportunities for new forms of ‘cooperative’ knowledge base development. Automated and customized means of linking knowledge bases and inferencing dialogues to a large dynamic ‘real world’ legal information system (the Australasian Legal Information Institute) are provided, giving one means of overcoming the ‘knowledge base lag’. The project’s development tools are available to any legal knowledge base developer via the web.This was the first paper to explain Austliis approach to implementing rule-based reasoning systems in the context of free access to law legal information institutes.

Generating legal arguments

Legal reasoning in the Common Law system has elements of reasoning by analogy, of reasoning from example, and certain characteristics which are unique. A legal expert system must provide a sophisticated level of justification for its advice, for the justification is the systems most important product. A legal expert system and its associated report generating system is described here.

Privacy in Australia

The defining events in the history of privacy protection in Australia have had a great deal to do with politics, little to do with an orderly process of law reform, and nothing to do with the Courts. This paper supports this argument from a history of the development of Australian law protecting privacy (and its many omissions from the early 1970s) through to 2008. Although state laws emerged in the 1970s, the defining event was the defeat of the proposed ‘Australia Card’ national ID system in 1987, and the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), covering the federal public sector only, and tax file number system that followed in its wake. The 1990s saw attempts to regulate Australia’s increasing state data surveillance, and credit reporting. It took until 2001 for the Privacy Act to be extended to the private sector. The paper surveys key personal data systems and their regulation in Australia, the patchwork and incomplete privacy laws across the States and Territories. The determining factors in Australia’s privacy history have been political conflict, the media and their effective use, and legislation (both its passage and its defeat). Unlike elsewhere Courts have played a minor role. The paper explains why this is so, by reference to the Australian constitutional structure and its limitation, and similarly the common law. As a result of these limits. Australian law’s protection of privacy has principally involved legislation, or attempts to legislate, and the political conflict around such attempts. The common privacy principles in this legislation, and the complaint-driven approach of Privacy Commissioners is set out. The roles of public opinion, elite opinion, national culture and international influences are all set out. The paper concludes with another surveillance extension ‘near miss’, the defeated ‘Health and Welfare Access Card’ proposals of 2007-8. The paper finishes with the observation that, after that, it is more likely that Australia will be back to the usual situation of governments frustrated in pursuing their ambitions of surveillance (in order to achieve their other goals) because of oppositions opportunistically advocating privacy in order to create political damage to their opponents. In Australia, privacy’s only friend in politics is opportunism.

Controlling and augmenting legal inferencing: ysh , a case study

If legal inferencing systems are to be used for immediate practical application, they are best constructed by embedding them in other technologies which can assist in augmenting and controlling the course of inferencing. Adoption of a (quasi) natural language knowledge representation assists easier development of user interpretative facilities, user control of the course of inferencing and explanation facilities. The paper explains how the DataLex Workstation Software, particularly its inference engine, ysh, implements these approaches.

The privacy workstation

This article presents the purposes and operation of The Privacy Workstation, a knowledge-based application on Australian privacy law, developed for both research and commercial purposes as part of the DataLex Project on legal expert systems. The Workstation aims to be a general-purpose tool for privacy law research, administration, or advocacy. Any single computing technique is unlikely to be adequate to such a task, so the Workstation software integrates three techniques: hypertext browsing, free-text searching, and rule-based inferencing. A user may use any combination of these techniques in their own enquiries using the Workstation. The Workstation integrated three previous DataLex programs: • HYPE (v.2), a hypertext (or ‘text navigation’) engine; • AIRS (v.3), a text retrieval engine; • Y-SH (v.l), an inferencing engine. YSH, AIRS and HYPE comprise the three ‘engines’ within the Workstation software, but with a new common interface. This is the most comprehensive paper about the earliest version of the Workstation software and an application using it. The Privacy Workstation - User Manual is at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2993926

With a wysh and a prayer: an experiment in cooperative development of legal knowledgebases

This paper describes an ongoing experiment in collaborative construction of legal knowledgebases over the World Wide Web. The home page for this research is at http://wysh.austlii.edu.au, and further papers on this work may be found there.

Legal Expert Systems: Words, Words Words...?

Some special features of the legal domain which affect the development of expert systems are examined, including: why ‘ready made rules’ are a problem, not an answer; the relationship between prescriptive laws and legal source materials; ‘rules’ of interpretation of statutes are not meta-rules; ‘precedents’ of case-law cannot always be treated as rules; the need for access to legal source materials; the relevance of ‘deep’ or causal models to the legal domain; reasons why lawyers must play the main role in developing legal expert systems. DATALEX, a joint research project by the authors which commenced in 1986, is outlined. Its main aims are: (i) to develop a shell which integrates a number of inferencing techniques in a consistent environment, and is itself integrated with a free text retrieval system. The shell, LES (Legal Expert System), includes decision network and nearest neighbour discriminant analysis modules; other inferencing modules are being added; and a free-text retrieval system, AIRS, is being integrated with LES. (ii) to use this shell, and to encourage others to use it, to develop a range of knowledge-based applications in different areas of Australian law. Applications as yet concern intestacy, copyright, the finding of chattels, and other areas of law. (iii) to use these applications as a teaching resource to encourage interest in and understanding of knowledge-based techniques and their potential by Australian lawyers.This 1987 paper was the first paper published about the DataLex Project, which ran from 1985-1995.

Building sustainable free legal advisory systems: Experiences from the history of AI & law

The enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI) as a source of solutions to problems is not new. In law, from the early 1980s until at least the early 2000s, considerable work was done on developing ‘legal expert systems.’ As the DataLex project, we participated in those developments from the outset, through research and publications, commercial and non-commercial systems, and teaching students application development. This paper commences with a brief account of that work (with references and links to all published papers). The perspective of this paper is an assessment of what might be of value from the experience of the DataLex project to contemporary use of ‘AI and law’ by providers of free legal advice services, who must necessarily work within funding and other constraints in developing and sustaining such systems. We draw fourteen conclusions from DataLex’s experience which we consider are relevant from that perspective. The desired result, we argue, is the development of integrated legal decision-support systems, not ‘expert systems’ or ‘robot lawyers’. The paper concludes with brief suggestions concerning the future development of the DataLex project tools and approaches within the context of the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII). The objectives of free access to legal information services have much in common with those of free legal advice services. The information resources that AustLII (and other LIIs) can provide will often be those that free legal advice services will need to use to develop and sustain free legal advisory systems. The key challenge is for LIIs and free legal advice service to find achievable applications that meet the needs of clients and add value to decision-making that cannot otherwise be achieved at equivalent cost or quality. * Respectively, Professor of Law & Information Systems, UNSW Australia and Co-founder, AustLII; Professor of Law & Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and Co-Director, AustLII; and Associate Professor of Law, UNSW Australia and Executive Director, AustLII. ** Thanks to Roger Clarke, Anna Cody, and Jill Matthews for valuable comments; all content remains the responsibility of the authors. Building sustainable legal advisory systems 2