Professor Barbara Stark joined Blair & Weiner on the second edition of their casebook, "Family Law in the World Community." The book has been updated and trimmed, although it retains a wide range of topics and materials. It covers a variety of private international law issues, including child abduction, child custody, adoption, child support enforcement, and recognition of marriages and divorces. The book also explores the impact of public international law on both domestic and international regulation of the family, using topics such as family violence and the rights of the child. The book uses comparative law materials to examine traditional family law topics, such as the regulation of marriage, the rights of same-sex couples, adoption, reproductive freedom, and more.

Professor Vern Walker published a chapter entitled “Emergent Reasoning Structures in Law,” in HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH ON AGENT-BASED SOCIETIES: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS (Goran Trajkovski and Samuel G. Collins, Editors; Idea Group Inc (IGI), 2009).

ABSTRACT:

In modern legal systems, a large number of autonomous agents can achieve reasonably fair and accurate decisions in tens of thousands of legal cases. In many of those cases, the issues are complicated, the evidence is extensive, and the reasoning is complex. The decision-making process also integrates legal rules and policies with expert and non-expert evidence. This chapter discusses two major types of reasoning that have emerged to help bring about this remarkable social achievement: systems of rule-based deductions and patterns of evidence evaluation. In addition to those emergent structures, second-order reasoning about legal reasoning itself not only coordinates the decision-making, but also promotes the emergence of new reasoning structures. The chapter analyzes these types of reasoning structures using a many-valued, predicate, default logic – the Default-Logic (D-L) Framework. This framework is able to represent legal knowledge and reasoning in actual cases, to integrate and help evaluate expert and non-expert evidence, to coordinate agents working on different legal problems, and to guide the evolution of the knowledge model over time. The D-L Framework is also useful in automating portions of legal reasoning, as evidenced by the Legal Apprentice software. The framework therefore facilitates the interaction of human and non-human agents in legal decision-making, and makes it possible for non-human agents to participate in the evolution of legal reasoning in the future. Finally, because the D-L Framework itself is grounded in logic and not on theories peculiar to the legal domain, it is applicable to other knowledge domains that have a complexity similar to that of law and solve problems through default reasoning.

Lexis/Nexis will publish a Canadian edition of the treatise by Professor Monroe H. Freedman and Abbe Smith, Understanding Lawyers' Ethics. The Canadian version, which will be adapted to Canadian law and ethics rules, will be co-authored by University of Calgary Professor Alice Woolley.

Professor Norman I. Silber's entry on Herbert Wechsler has been published in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, edited by Roger K. Newman.

Maurice A. Deane Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law Eric M. Freedman's entry on Leo Frank has been published in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, edited by Roger K. Newman.