This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving informed consent.1 We covered this topic in previous articles in The Journal of Clinical Ethics.2 But an updated discussion is warranted. First, informed consent remains a central and critically important issue in clinical ethics. Second, there have been numerous significant legal changes over the past year. We cate...

A Bayesian network (BN) is a graphical model of uncertainty that is especially well-suited to legal arguments. It enables us to visualise and model dependencies between different hypotheses and pieces of evidence and to calculate the revised probability beliefs about all uncertain factors when any piece of new evidence is presented. Although BNs have been widely discussed and recently used in t...

A Bayesian network (BN) is a graphical model of uncertainty that is especially well suited to legal arguments. It enables us to visualize and model dependencies between different hypotheses and pieces of evidence and to calculate the revised probability beliefs about all uncertain factors when any piece of new evidence is presented. Although BNs have been widely discussed and recently used in t...

We who teach legal ethics employ many of the teacher's arts to win our students' appreciation for the course.' We do not always succeed. As Deborah Rhode has observed, "[t]here are inherent problems and infinite ways to fail in teaching this subject."2 Yet, we continue to seek a method for teaching the course effectively. If nothing else, our efforts have led to the development of a substantial...

The importance of the area under the normal curve (AUC) as a measure of the effect size (ES) in applied and forensic research has been highlighted in several articles and Tables for converting the AUC curve into Pearson’s rpb and Cohen’s d have been published. No Tables have been published for converting AUC into other frequently used effect size indexes, such as OR and Ln(OR). In this article,...

Topic models are statistical models that detect themes in text corpora. They can be used in information retrieval to find documents that are "similar" to a query, based on the similarity of the themes in the query to the documents in the retrieval database. Applying such models to the domain of legal research might help in improving the efficacy and accuracy of legal research and writing proces...

We propose an algorithm for the automatic acquisition of a bilingual lexicon in the legal domain. We make use of a parallel corpus of bilingual court judgments, aligned to the sentence level, and analyse the bilingual context profiles to extract corresponding legal terms in both languages. Our method is different from those in past studies as it does not require any prior knowledge source, and ...

Contemporary conception of information has been studied for decades. Starting from legal viewpoint, purpose of this article is to provide methodological understanding of the conception and classification of information in the domain of law, and the challenge it poses to the traditional legal system. In this article, information is classified into five categories according to the value it has an...