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The concept of a legal document is a general concept obtained by a process of abstractization and generalization of characters common to the different acts it incorporates and it is used both in the doctrine, practice and even in the legislation with two meanings having different values; the first meaning designates the manifestation of will with the intent to produce civil legal effects and the second meaning designates the very confirmation of this manifestation of will. To create the personal juridical acts and the gratuitous ones that are concluded both between living persons and for mortis causa, it is necessary to take into consideration the gifts which, at their turn, are legal documents by which a person gratuitously disposes of their goods, totally or partially, in favour of another person. These gifts have the most specific characters and they constitute a special category of documents whose regulation creates diverse effects at legal level since there is a tight correlation by the judicial regime applicable with different institutions of the private law. On the other hand, this subclass of negotium juris presents a major importance from the social point of view translating at the institutional and normative level interhuman relationships having a marked private character and giving expression to certain social practices characterized by a high level of subjectivism and voluntarism. Thus, social relationships are sanctioned by these legal forms that have both a patrimonial and objective dimension and a constant attitudinal component most often present under the form of animus donandi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the failure of U.S. courts to adopt a consistent approach to Rule 1003(1) challenges. It recalls court cases in 1814 and 2005 wherein the authenticity of duplicate copies of documents were questioned. Rule 1003 contains the provisions concerning the admissibility of duplicate copies in court proceedings which include the authenticity of the original copy. It also examines the reasons and methods that courts used in adopting the Best Evidence Rule in 1700.

Abstract We propose a method for performing evaluation of relevance feedback based on simulating real users. The user simulation applies a model defining the user's relevance threshold to accept individual documents as feedback in a graded relevance environment;user's patience to browse the initial list of retrieved documents; and his/her effort in providing the feedback. We evaluate the result by using cumulated gain-based evaluation together with freezing all documents seen by the user in order to simulate the point of view of a user who is browsing the documents during the retrieval process. We demonstrate the method by performing a simulation in the laboratory setting and present the ''branching'' curve sets characteristic for the presented evaluation method. Both the average and topic by-topic results indicate that if the freezing approach is adopted, giving feedback of mixed quality makes sense for various usage scenarios even though the modeled users prefer finding especially the most relevant documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We describe a procedure for reconstructing documents that have been shredded by hand, a problem that often arises in forensics. The proposed method first applies a polygonal approximation in order to reduce the complexity of the boundaries and then extracts relevant features of the polygon to carry out the local reconstruction. In this way, the overall complexity can be dramatically reduced because few features are used to perform the matching. The ambiguities resulting from the local reconstruction are resolved and the pieces are merged together as we search for a global solution. The preliminary results reported in this paper, which take into account a limited amount of shredded pieces (10–15) demonstrate that feature-matching-based procedure produces interesting results for the problem of document reconstruction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents the amendment to the Supreme Court of Missouri Rule 58.01(c) (4) on the production of documents for inspection. Also cited are the federal law in the U.S. on electronically stored information (ESI) production, the interpretation of the 'reasonably usable' phrase under the law, and how the rule change should be enforced.

Seizure of documents at company offices by competition inspectors without prior authorisation by a court or control of the operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]