This volume contains the proceedings of the twenty-fourth edition of the International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2011). The conference was held in Vienna, Austria on December 14th–16th at the University of Vienna's Centre for Legal Informatics. The annual JURIX conferences are held under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (www.jurix.nl).

The JURIX conference has been running annually for over 20 years and provides an international forum for both academics and practitioners in the field of legal informatics to meet and share research to advance the field of legal knowledge-based systems. Original papers on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge were solicited, covering all aspects of the topic spanning foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications. There were 36 submissions to the conference this year, with the authors of submitted papers coming from 18 different countries. The peer review process was conducted by a programme committee of 35 members who are experts in the field of legal informatics. Of the 36 submissions, 12 were accepted for publication as full papers of ten pages (33%). In addition, 7 short papers of five pages and 3 research abstracts of two pages are included in the proceedings.

The selected papers cover a wide range of topics on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge. Governatori et al. provide an extension of defeasible logic to represent different concepts of defeasible permission. Boer and van Engers present a framework for implementation of compliance in public administration. Ciaghi et al. tackle the problem of managing legal documents by providing software metrics that are analysed with a set of Italian laws. Winkels et al. consider how the network of citations between cases can be used as an indication of relevance and authority in the Dutch legal system. Täks et al. present an approach to find hidden structure in legislation, applying the approach to some Estonian legislation. Carneiro et al. develop conflict resolution models that are able to classify the disputant parties according to their personal conflict style. Prakken and Sartor provide a formal model of argumentation with burdens and standards of proof. Bex et al. show how factual stories can be assessed through the use of precedents. Grabmair et al. present results on extracting semantic information from US state public health legislative provisions. Wyner and Peters look at how rules can be identified and extracted from regulations. Bench-Capon considers the treatment of value conflicts in light of a series of US Supreme Court decisions. Finally, Ashley and Goldin consider how a computer-supported peer-review process among students can be applied in legal education.

Two invited lectures were also part of the conference. Professor Witold Abramowicz from Poznan University of Economics, Poland spoke about the Linked Open Data paradigm and how the vision of reusable public data may be fulfilled using this paradigm. Professor Maria Wimmer from the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany spoke about research foundations for e-government, covering theoretical grounds and, strategic and policy demands.

No conference can run smoothly without the support of a solid programme committee and many thanks are extended to the committee members for their hard work in producing valuable reviews and discussing the papers submitted. The programme committee members were:

• Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA

• Zsolt Balogh, University of Pecs, Hungary

• Trevor Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK

• Floris Bex, University of Dundee, UK

• Alexander Boer, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Danièle Bourcier, CNRS CERSA, University of Paris 2, France

• Pompeu Casanovas, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain

• Jack G. Conrad, Thomson Reuters, USA

• Enrico Francesconi, ITTIG-CNR, Florence, Italy

• Anne Gardner, Atherton, USA

• Thomas Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany

• Guido Governatori, NICTA, Australia

• Davide Grossi, University of Liverpool, UK

• Carole Hafner, Northeastern University, USA

• Rinke Hoekstra, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Friedrich Lachmayer, University of Innsbruck, Austria

• L. Thorne McCarty, Rutgers University, USA

• Laurens Mommers, Legal Intelligence, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

• Paulo Novais, Universidade do Minho, Portugal

• Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna, Italy

• Radim Polčák, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

• Henry Prakken, Universiteit Groningen and Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

• Paulo Quaresma, Universidade de Evora and Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

• Antonino Rotolo, University of Bologna, Italy

• Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Florence – Cirsfid, University of Bologna, Italy

• Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics and Sokendai, Japan

• Burkhard Schafer, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

• Uri Schild, Bar Ilan University, Israel

• Erich Schweighofer, University of Vienna, Austria

• Tom van Engers, Leibniz Center for Law, The Netherlands

• Bart Verheij, Universiteit Groningen, The Netherlands

• Doug Walton, University of Windsor, Canada

• Radboud Winkels, Leibniz Center for Law, The Netherlands

• Adam Wyner, University of Liverpool, UK

• John Zeleznikow, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

Thanks also go to Erich Schweighofer for organising the conference this year, as well as to Radboud Winkels and Henry Prakken in their respective roles as past president and current president of the JURIX foundation, through which they have provided support for this edition of the conference.

Katie M. Atkinson

Programme Chair

Department of Computer Science,

University of Liverpool, UK

K.M.Atkinson@liverpool.ac.uk