Jusletter IT

We began to carry out interdisciplinary research related to the storage and retrieval of legal documentation, in collaboration with several European partners, in the middle of the eighties. The objective was to use the technical possibilities of expert systems to recover legal texts. The chosen method was the construction of an intelligent Legal Thesaurus in those days. It was too early. The technology was not ready yet. The research did however generate philosophical approaches with regard to accessing legal texts.

As the Internet became a reality, another object of research appeared: how to guarantee individual rights to communicate thoughts freely when recovering information; this involved identification management and electronic signatures. We started these activities in the middle of the nineties.

In the framework of the Bologna Process, not only European teachers are involved in an exchange of their methods of teaching, but also students must adapt their ways and place of learning. In this sense, nowadays we are working in the integration of storage and retrieval systems, identification management and on-line learning platforms which give focus to a LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus.

The transition to the information society promises new services, solutions, and products but, at the same time, brings challenges, issues and problems in many areas. One of these areas is the joint activity between Law, Management and Technical knowledge subjects («knowledge areas»). These joint activities comprise an important inter-disciplinary field, especially the intersection of ICT and law. ICT offers solutions to the legal system for new and better services to the citizens and to improve the legal system itself. Law offers balanced solutions to the use of ICT in areas such as Intellectual Property Rights, privacy, and security. New technological solutions offer services such electronic signature, e-Commerce, e-Governance and e-Democracy, and at the same time introduce new legal issues. These are also studied in the use of ICT in the legal system and law in ICT.

ICT and Law is thus a vital discipline. There is a need for training and education, but also for sharing of expertise, experience, teaching and learning, and best practice. This need is all across Europe and all across the world. But training and education available in this area are limited, and sharing of best practices and experience and expertise is not widely practiced. One reason for this is the scarcity of experts in the field. Another reason is that the field itself is not yet mature and needs to be defined.

As LAW&ICT is a new discipline, Universities must design the teaching of this new topics in a broad perspective; a useful initiative is to create an interdisciplinary team of both technological and law specialists to deal with this task.

The next step must be to train students to research and to develop the knowledge about these subjects in their own countries and share that information with other students of other countries.

Some years ago, the idea of sharing anything all over the world necessarily implied that a group of people should be together in the same place and at the same time. But things are no longer this way. ICT are here to avoid it.

Of course, it is possible for a relatively small group of students to study abroad for one or two semesters and for a relatively small group of teachers to teach abroad for a more or less short period (this is the aim of the European Erasmus Programme, since 1987), but all students in the world studying abroad at the same time and all the teachers in the world teaching abroad at the same time would be too expensive and too complex.

But problems disappear if the classic meaning of «abroad» (physically in a foreign country ) is changed into a more innovative one (virtually in a foreign country ). And this change is possible thanks to the ICT.

In fact, the idea of a common university world space is only possible using ICT to build a common virtual campus.

Up to now, most of the existing virtual campuses only offer services from one university, e.g. offer on-line the same courses offered also on site. However, a virtual campus can be a more potent tool. Our initial plan envisages a place for many universities all over the world for offering on-line courses for students world-wide. The LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus is the solution.

The LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus started its current development from a European Community grant¹ . The project partners were working together since 2005, supported by two European Community grants, from 2003 to 2005 the first one² and from 2005 to 2007 the second one³ . As a result of those grants, a wide network of experts in Law in ICT called, LEFIS⁴ (Legal Framework for the information Society) was established. The experts worked together with the aim of establishing the teaching guidelines in this area. More than 70 partners were part of this network.

11 LEFIS partners started the LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus project. The University partners in the project were initially from: 1) Faculties of Law: Bahcesehir (Istanbul, Turkey), Belfast (United Kingdom), La Laguna (Spain), Münster (Germany), Rovaniemi (Finland), Torun (Poland) and Zaragoza (Spain), 2) Faculties of Business Studies: Beja (Portugal), Mykolas Romeris (Vilnius, Lituania) and Vaasa (Finland), 3) Polytechnics Centers: Bahcesehir (Istambul, Turkey), Beja (Portugal) and Zaragoza (Spain) and 4) Documentation Studies: Zaragoza (Spain).

Besides the eleven initial partners, nowadays other partners coming from the Faculties of Law of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), National University of la Plata (Argentina), University of Islas Baleares (Spain) and University of País Vasco (Spain) participate in the Virtual Campus offering several courses.

Figures 1 and 2 show the LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus logo and the main Webpage (www.lawict.eu ), respectively.

The LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus relies on a set of information tools to ensure a highly relevant and precise transfer of knowledge among their actors.

In order to ensure maximum customization and interoperability and also to provide the best transfer potential of the project to both developed and developing countries, only free open source software has been used (Figure 3).

The information system is composed of three different functional and technological environments. The first environment is an e-learning content management system to provide basic and advanced electronic learning features, which is built on Moodle, a well-known open software for digital learning environments. One reason for selecting Moodle was the already wide use in partner universities.

The Moodle platform is used to manage the creation, management and use of all the digital campus courses.

The design and development of LAW&ICT modules is guided by the social constructionist pedagogy. This pedagogy consists in the contrasts of the contents of the teaching with other prior knowledge and culture. It accepts that there is more interpretation going on than a transfer of information from one brain to another.

The basic content of the educational system that constitutes the LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus is integrated for:

The courses that the participant Universities offer in their ordinary teaching with the help of the learning technical resources that they use, in general the Moodle system, and

The envisaged offer to teach jointly as an initial content of the LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus.

The Virtual Campus offer is constituted by the moment by 58 modules/courses on the target matters of the Virtual Campus: LAW&ICT. All of them can be studied in blended format, in the languages of the participanting universities or in English.

Table 1 and 2 present the current distribution of the offered modules attending to language, number of courses and name of the responsible university. The courses are on Business Law and Civil Law, Civil and Criminal Law and Philosophy and Theory of Law for Faculties of Law, Computers and Law for Engineering Schools, Law Faculties, and Business and Tourism Studies. The full list is available in www.lawict.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=210& Itemid=449.

The courses are offered preferably at graduate level; other courses are proposed for studies of postgraduate and graduate degree. There are several initiatives that propose the joint use by the students of the different Universities the offers of the network partners.

The initial foreseen joint offer of postgraduate level in e-learning modality is constituted by the LEFIS Master, title recognized by the University of Zaragoza, six LEFIS Diplomas and Specialization Courses.

The educational load of the Master is 60 ECTS, 30 ECTS is the load of the Diplomas and 5-6 ECTS the load of the Courses. The registration for this offer is open.

Though from their very beginning very different views and models of digital libraries have existed [1] and [2]; nowadays, they are the unavoidable platform to provide just-in-time high-quality user-focused, precise and exhaustive multimedia materials.

The LAW&ICT Digital Library aim is publishing and making available multimedia documents on LAW&ICT, ensuring all the bibliographic control features available in a library and also the immediate online availability of the materials.

The LAW&ICT Digital Library is implemented on Greenstone, a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. Greenstone allows for Dublin Core metadata cataloguing and standardized storing formats.

The library is including all kind of relevant multimedia material, printed, audio, still images, video, and multimedia. It includesrelevant published works, academic, professional, legislation, jurisprudence, and also related grey literature, publishing free materials with author permission or redirecting to copy-righted materials.

One of the main subprojects is the online republishing of out-of-print materials with copyright recovered by authors in the LEFIS digital series.

Another column of the LEFIS virtual campus is the online encyclopaedia. Online collaborative encyclopaedias follow the remarkable success of Wikipedia, and is being more a more envisioned and used in specialized contexts[3] and, of course, legal education [4].

Advancing in this direction, the LAW&ICT Encyclopaedia (LEFISpedia) is a moderated and supervised scientific multilingual collaborative dictionary on LAW&ICT with a strong concept tree and hypertext functionalities.

LEFISpedia is implemented on MediaWiki, the engine supporting Wikipedia, the famous and popular Internet encyclopaedia.

The LAW&ICT Encyclopaedia will have ISSN to encourage and recognize participation. Regarding motivation, it is considered to be important for senior scientists to participate in any successful online encyclopaedia, as it has a serious chance to become one of the best and most consulted reference tools in the area. On the other side, junior and postgraduate researchers can quickly gain visibility and recognition by participating in such a project.

The editorial organization is formed by a scientific editor, a technical director, a panel of subject editors -forming together the scientific council- and reviewers, which in the future will be differentiated in an editors’ panel and a reviewing one.

It is being considered to hire assistant editors to include previous definitions by important and relevant authors, from works with free copyright or gaining permission from authors or editors (with proper recognition). Assistant editors would be responsible for interlinking entries among them and with other external documents. Copyright recognition is, of course, considered a key quality topic.

All the authors must be identified. They can be either self-appointed candidates, nominated by any person or body, or invited by any member of the scientific council. Their participation is subjected to approval by the scientific council.

The LAW&ICT Encyclopaedia will be open to public participation using forums and comments with standard netiquette.

One of the upcoming problems when designing the technical solution for the LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus Website was the identification and management of access of users (mainly teachers and students).

1. a Public Key Infrastructure (LEFIS-PKI), based on open standards (X.509), to manage the provision and maintenance of digital certificates,
   
2. an identification module based on digital certificates to substitute the identification mechanism of Moodle, based on the pair user-password,
   
3. an authentication module to integrate LEFIS-PKI and Greenstone, in the same way as LEFIS-PKI and Moodle are, has been developed to limit the access to LEFIS digital certificate owners to some selected documents in the LAW&ICT Digital Library.

The activities described here are becoming a reality due to the adoption of the university reform of Bologna, that it is, in more or less measure, in the participant Universities and countries in the project. A recent report [3] gives an overview (per country) of the differences on the adoption of the Bologna reform (see Table 3). The report includes studies on the state of the reform in Finland, Germany, Poland, Portugal, United Kingdom and Spain.

Three of the mentioned countries are located in an upper-middle level (United Kingdom, Finland and Portugal) in relation with the fulfillment of the reform, and three are in the low level: Poland, Germany and Spain. Spain it is located in the last place.

The indicators used as reference, attending to the policies of the Bologna Declaration, to establish the order of the ranking are the following:

1. Inclusiveness: The ability of a country’s tertiary education system to graduate large numbers of students relative to the size of its population.
2. Access: The ability of a country’s tertiary system to accept and help advance students with low levels of scholastic aptitude from secondary schools.
3. Effectiveness: The ability of a country’s educational system to produce graduates with skills relevant for the country’s labour market.
4. Attractiveness: The ability of a country’s system to attract a diverse range of foreign students.
5. Age-Range: The ability of a country’s tertiary system to function as a lifelong learning institution.
6. Responsiveness: The system’s ability to reform and change. It is considered the speed and effectiveness with which countries have adapted their education system to the criteria laid down in the Bologna reform.

The differences have to do with the fact that the reforms of the university system are fundamental and thus not easy to do despite the political will of the respective governments.

Consequently, the implementation of the modules created by the project LAW&ICT Shared Virtual Campus as part of the educational offer of the participanting universities are different, according to the legislation of each country. The modules learned in the Faculties of Law, for example, are scarcely accepted; because the Bologna reform is slowly implemented in Germany, Poland and Spain

On the other hand the novelty of the studies of Master in countries of non Anglo-Saxon culture also retards the possibility of lauching the joint LEFIS Master. It is related with the scarce number of students having an interest in carrying out graduate and postgraduate studies: the licentiate/graduate studies.

Development and innovation is being carried out in the integration of e-learning, wiki, digital libraries and PKI software to provide an integrated environment for knowledge representation, organization and sharing in the field of Law and Information and Communication Technologies.

The activities are in development in this moment; thus the conclusions are provisional. The deployment of a new international multi-institutional joint activity involves practical difficulties, in particular with technical resources. Main problems arise from the application of general standards of law studies different in each country and institution.

This research is partially supported by the European Union, Lifelong Learning Programme 2007–2013, ref.: 133837-LLP-1-2007-1-ES-ERASMUS-EVC and the Spanish Agency for International Coooperation and Development (AECID), ref. D/016443/08

[1] Borgman, CL What are digital libraries? Competing visions (1999). In Information Processing & Management Vol. 35: 3 (May 1999) 227-243.
[2] Dalbello, M; Saracevic, T; Palmer, C, et al. (2004). Diffusion of knowledge in the field of digital library development: How is the field shaped by visionaries, engineers, and pragmatists?. In Proceedings of the 67th ASIS&T Annual Meeting, VOL 41, 2004, p. 564-566.
[3] Giustini, D. (2006). How Web 2.0 is changing medicine - Is a medical wikipedia the next step? .In British Medical Journal. Vol. 333:7582 (Dec 23 2006) 1283-1284.
[4] Noveck, B.S. (2007). Wikipedia and the future of legal education In Journal of legal education. Vol. 57: 1 (2007) 3-9.

Fernando Galindo, Penal Law, Philosophy of Law and History of Law Department Faculty of Law, University of Zaragoza, 50009 Spain,cfa@unizar.es