A Legal Protective Tool: Environmental Laws

A Software Tool for Legal Drafting

Although many attempts at automated aids for legal drafting have been made, they were based on the construction of a new tool, completely from scratch. This is at least curious, considering that a strong parallelism can be established between a normative document and a software specification: both describe what an entity should or should not do, can or cannot do. In this article we compare norm...

Assessing laws and legal authorities for public health emergency legal preparedness.

Improving laws and legal authorities for public health emergency legal preparedness.

47 Introduction This paper is one of the four interrelated action agenda papers resulting from the National Summit on Public Health Legal Preparedness (Summit) convened in June 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multi-disciplinary partners. Each of the action agenda papers deals with one of the four core elements of legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities; compete...

Detecting Legal Definitions for Automated Style Checking in Draft Laws

The automatic detection of definitions in legal texts has mainly been considered from the perspective of legal information retrieval so far. In this paper, we demonstrate that the same techniques can also be employed for the purpose of a domain-specific automated style checking of draft laws. We report on the automatic identification of legal definitions in a large corpus of Swiss laws, and we ...

Do minimum legal tobacco purchase age laws work?

This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of the minimum legal tobacco purchase age (MLTPA) laws on smoking behavior among young adults. Using data from the confidential version of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997 Cohort), which contains information on the exact birth date of the respondents, we find that the effect of the MLTPA on several indicators of...