Daily Archives: December 2, 2009

Moroccan Family Code

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GlobalRights.org produced an English language translation of the Moroccan Family Code (Moudawana) of 2004.

http://www.globalrights.org/site/DocServer/Moudawana-English_Translation.pdf

This unofficial English translation of the 2004 Moroccan Family Law (Moudawana) was prepared by a team of English and Arabic speaking lawyers at the Global Rights head office in Washington D.C. and our field office in Rabat, and a professional Arabic-English Moroccan translator. Our intention was to produce an English language text that reproduces as faithfully as possible the original Arabic text, rather than to elaborate an autonomous English legal text. We have therefore privileged a literal translation rather than attempted to clarify, explain or interpret the intention of the legislator. Global Rights hopes that this translation will be useful to researchers, NGOs and public authorities interested in family law and the rights of women in Morocco.

hat tip to to Katie Zoglin.

Wikipedia in Court: When and How Citing Wikipedia and Other Consensus Websites is Appropriate

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“Wikipedia in Court: When and How Citing Wikipedia and Other Consensus Websites is Appropriate”

HANNAH B. MURRAY, affiliation not provided to SSRN

JASON C. MILLER, Government of the United States of America – United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit

Practitioners and courts are relying more and more on Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Hundreds of court opinions, including at least one from every federal circuit court, and thousands of law review articles cite Wikipedia. Some opinions have relied on Wikipedia for technical information, although others only turned to the consensus website for background information on minor points.

This practice has generated controversy, with newspapers, professors, practitioners, and judges weighing in. Wikipedia in Court examines the controversy and the history of Wikipedia in court opinions before proposing a framework to determine when it is appropriate and inappropriate to rely on Wikipedia for authority in legal writing. Given the inconsistency in the legal community’s use of Wikipedia, courts and practitioners will benefit from this framework.

 

Source:  LSN Legal Writing Vol. 4 No. 32,  12/02/2009

Properties of the United States Code Citation Network

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“Properties of the United States Code Citation Network”

MICHAEL JAMES BOMMARITO, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – Department of Political Science, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – Center for Study of Complex Systems

DANIEL MARTIN KATZ, University of Michigan Law School , University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – Center for Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan – Department of Political Science

The United States Code is a body of documents that collectively comprises the statutory law of the United States. In this short paper, we investigate the properties of the network of citations contained within the Code – most notably its degree distribution. Acknowledging the text contained within each of the Code’s section nodes, we adjust our interpretation of the nodes to control for section length. Though we find a number of interesting properties in these degree distributions, we demonstrate that a power law distribution is not an appropriate model for this system.

 

Source:  LSN Experimental & Empirical Studies Vol. 10 No. 103,  12/02/2009