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In this paper we describe the process of developing and implementing a knowledge management system for the Spanish judicial domain. Spanish judges, especially newly‐recruited ones, hold a solid background of theoretical legal knowledge, but are much less familiar with the judicial knowledge of the more senior judges acquired from everyday practice and case resolution. The aim of this development is to capture and model these two aspects of judicial knowledge – theoretical and practical – for knowledge browsing and retrieving.

Semantic web technologies are applied to feed a question‐answering system based on ontologies of professional legal knowledge (OPLK).

There is a kind of specific legal knowledge, which belongs properly to the expert domain, not being captured by current legal core ontologies, i.e. Judges require clues, hints or well‐grounded practical guidelines that refer to the problem they have before them when they put a question or start the query. A scalable and useful frequently‐asked questions system should have a simple, natural language interface, work in a real time environment, and the questions included in the system should be of high quality and reflect the current situation.

The final system will enable the users to ask queries in natural language and obtain answers, which are supported by legal documents stored in specialized legal databases. Special care is taken regarding usability issues, in order to ensure the highest user satisfaction.

Legal information work has expanded with the growth in knowledge management and emergence of a new type of knowledge/information manager, the professional support lawyer. This study aims to investigate competency requirements for library‐based information work in UK law firms, including the specialist subject knowledge required, methods of development and the impact on information professionals of professional support lawyers.

The investigation used a pragmatic mixed‐methods approach, including a mainly quantitative questionnaire, administered online to 64 legal information professionals, followed by eight semi‐structured interviews and a focus group with four participants. A literature review informed the questionnaire design and contextualised the findings.

The survey confirmed a broad range of competency requirements and clarified the specific subject knowledge needed. Participants favoured a varied combination of formal, and informal learning. Most participants also wanted specialised professional education for the sector.

The nature of the sample and use of categorised questions were limiting factors, partly compensated by inviting open‐ended comments and follow‐up interviews. A larger study using qualitative methods with professional support lawyers and fee‐earners would provide a fuller more rounded picture.

The findings indicate that the subject knowledge needed for legal information work in law firms is more extensive than for other sectors and suggest that information science departments should strengthen and extend curriculum content to reflect this need.

The study has advanced the understanding of the competency, education and training needs of UK legal information professionals, challenging assumptions about academic/professional qualifications and illuminating the blend of competencies needed.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the effects of competence and goodwill trust on knowledge creation and the moderating effects of legal inadequacy on those relationships.

A questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 196 research and development alliances in China. Hierarchical moderated regression was used to test the research hypotheses.

The authors find that competence trust has a positive and linear relationship with knowledge creation while goodwill trust has an inverted U-shaped relationship with it. The results also reveal that the inverted U-shaped relationship between goodwill trust and knowledge creation is stronger when legal inadequacy is high, while the impact of competence trust on knowledge creation is not influenced by legal inadequacy.

The findings provide insights into the distinctive effects of competence and goodwill trust on knowledge creation in partnerships, deepening current understandings of the bright and dark sides of inter-firm trust. This study also clarifies the influences of legal inadequacy on the effectiveness of competence and goodwill trust, which enhances existing knowledge about the impact of legal systems on the relationships between inter-firm trust and knowledge management.

This study is carried out to evaluate how well legal knowledge can be demonstrated by a built environment professional via the scenario-based approach to the learning of law modules.

A Delphi analysis of the advice provided by an MSC quantity surveying student, on a scenario-based legal problem arising due to a property contract, is carried out. The tendered legal advice was submitted as part of the assessment requirements for an MSc law module, following the university criteria, after the teaching of a law module. The student report, which attained an A-grade, and the assessment criteria used for marking/grading by the university were subsequently sent to 18 practicing lawyers, who were selected to constitute an expert panel, to independently judge the extent of legal knowledge demonstrated in the student report.

The Delphi analysis outcome showed that the expert panel holds a similar consensus view to the university on the level of legal knowledge demonstrated and by extension the effectiveness of the law module in imparting legal knowledge to a non-lawyer. The study outcome shows how well legal knowledge can be acquired and applied by a non-lawyer, within the context of the built environment, via scenario-based teaching of a law module.

This study serves as a preliminary step necessary to arouse further research toward empirically profiling the current outlook of a wider range of graduating students receiving scenario-based legal education in the built environment.

Legal systems govern social behaviour. They attempt to regulate order, collective peace and harmonious developments in society. The external social behaviour that law deals with is also a part of internal human behaviour. This external and internal nature of human behaviour, needs to be consciously studied and interlinked when legal systems desire elements of justice, equality, liberty, fraternity, dignity, integrity and unity for social collectivity. These elements, that legal systems guarantee come from an integration of individual and collective life on matters of social, political, economic etc., of various levels. The individuality and collectivity on these matters and levels are deeply psychological and spirited in sense as human behaviour operates through stimulus from inside to leave external effects outside or vice-versa through a function of thought-emotion-sensation-body complex. Thus, we see, our behaviour gets shaped by a two-way process of inner motivation and outer circumstance, individual and collective dimensions on a given matter and level. At this juncture, a critical study on this two-way relation in human behaviour and a set of unifying values to be identified for progressive intersections seem to be the future of legal systems for achieving greater goals of humanity. Additionally, legal systems that deal with justice are now becoming more than social, economic and political justice as new knowledge is revealing interrelations of spirit-mind-body or thought-emotion-sensation-body complex leaving us to think of new dimensions in justice. Thus, spirituality, as an exercise of human experiment and experience, provides a new scope for legal systems to deal with human and social behaviour to achieve order, peace and development. At this juncture, one even finds another unknown dimension gaining grounds and sinking to integrate or bring holistic responses to human problems and social challenges of the collective is the actual linking of spirituality through or with psychology or vice versa. Law and legalities of the thoughts and norms are interspersed in between these two disciplines. This is indeed a welcome trend as the psychological human and the social collective have become the axis on which every wheel of knowledge is tested and allowed to represent as spokes for inclusive, sustainable and harmonious inter-relational movement of things. One might see, know, feel or even ought to bear this interconnection that very often come in the actual spiritual practices where psychological dimensions emerge leading to wholesome experience of the state of our own individual and socio-collective nature. Among many kinds of spiritual experiences and experiments, two of them stand out for our legal consideration. One, an experience of timeless, space-less and boundless consciousness-awareness beyond life and world with which we witness, observe and understand the movement of things inside life and world, without our participation into them. Two, an experience of consciousness-awareness as power and force operating and animating through thought-emotion-sensation-body complex with our active participation in the movement of life and world. The former experience prepares the ground to remain free from all fetters of self-aggrandizing individualization before wider collectivity and, the latter experience prepares us to re-enter into wider collectivity to contribute with a freed sense of individualization, not imprisoned by its ego-aggrandizement that cuts the individual from the collective. These two spiritual experiences, one of the consciousness-awareness of freedom and, another of the consciousness-awareness with all potentials, when allowed to animate inside the human, it gives crucial understanding of the challenges of life and, pro-activation of solutions for those challenges that are extremely crucial for law and legal systems. A power of understanding the knowledge using spiritual experience of these two states of consciousness-awareness along with rationality, reason and logic, a strength operating through concentration of the energies in body aiding movement of knowledge, a harmony releasing itself through motivating-empathy and mutual-collaboration using knowledge and strength and, finally a near-perfect action operating through strategies, stages and steps in organizing daily life, human capital and all kinds of the systems of the world using knowledge, strength and harmony become our positive tools of empowerment. The combination of these two spiritual experiences of consciousness-awareness is useful to legal systems that look for solutions to human crises using interactive nature of individuality and collectivity on all issues of life, world and society. The chapter attempts to demonstrate that this kind of spirituality and its applied processes thus provide us the clue and strategy to achieve what the human nature and social existences of all kinds all over the world seek and aspire in the form of individual as well as collective peace, joy and compassion. It is also argued that this peace, joy and compassion that is spiritual in nature are in fact the origin and source of inspiration and stimulation for social, political and economic equality, liberty and fraternity in law, and the harmony and perfection of these elements seen as the justice that balances everything. The chapter demonstrates how applied spirituality can be used in law in the sense of law-making, judicial-interpretation, executive-governance, legal profession and finally a grand introduction of spirituality and its values into legal academics and research that are waiting to be liberated from the clutches of mere analytical knowledge of life and world moving towards new enriching powers of radiant collective life and wonderful harmonious world.

In recent years there has been a significant increase in the involvement of Australian schools with various aspects of the law and this has led to a number of claims that education has become legalised. A major consequence of this development is the need for principals to have a level of legal literacy sufficient to identify when a legal problem is developing in their school. Moreover, given the increased involvement of schools with the law, there would seem to be a need for principals to introduce preventive legal risk management strategies into school policies and practices. However, to implement such programmes, principals require a sound knowledge of those aspects of the law that they are required to manage. A recent study of some 300 principals from government schools in Queensland raises serious questions, however, regarding the level of principals’ professional knowledge of the law. This paper examines the concept of the legalisation of education and the extent to which school principals’ professional knowledge is adequate to meet the demands the law is making of them.

The purpose of this study is to examine a principal's knowledge of school law in Kuwait. It further aims to examine the relationship between a principal's knowledge of school law and other variables.

The study employed a quantitative research paradigm. Data for this study, collected via survey, were collected from a sample of 369 public school principals.

Using descriptive and inferential statistical methods, the findings indicated that school principals have only limited knowledge about the legal rights of teachers and students. Furthermore, the results revealed a significant difference in knowledge of school law relative to a principal's gender, school level, years of experience, knowledge source and the number of completed school law training courses.

The implications for professional development programs which prepare all school leaders to serve the needs of students’ and teachers’ rights are included.

Studies showed that there is a lack of research regarding a principal's legal knowledge in the Arab countries. As such, this study examined a school principal's knowledge of school law in Kuwait and discussed the associated implications for principal professional development programs.

The aim of this paper is to understand the competitive and collaborative relations existing between people practising in the same professional occupation, but working within different organisation contexts of employment.

An interview study of 42 in‐house and external lawyers is reported and set within contexts of the knowledge management and internationalisation of legal services. The data are analysed from an appropriation‐learning perspective and then discussed for the extent that these two groups make similar claims to property in work.

The in‐house lawyers give highest priority to the protection of resources and knowledge and aim to achieve it through trust in work relationships and by sharing, diffusing and controlling knowledge. By contrast, issues concerning individual reward and empowerment were seen as lower priority. External lawyers attach similar importance to knowledge sharing, its diffusion and control, but have slightly less concern for protecting knowledge and resources. They place less emphasis on trust and seem to value empowerment through legal innovation more so than do the in‐house lawyers.

Future research should be conducted on occupational and sub‐groups of knowledge workers to understand more systematically the dynamics of knowledge management, and the opportunities and constraints it creates for employees' property in work.

The research contributes to the literature on employees' property claims in work. It reflects on the extent that individuals' work identities must systematically adapt to different organisation contexts and approaches to knowledge management.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework of tax knowledge that can be used to analyse and discuss tax knowledge as a factor influencing tax compliance.

Relevant literature was sourced using keywords pertaining to tax knowledge to identify the constructs of the framework. Thereafter, secondary interview data on small business owners’ tax challenges were thematically analysed to test the proposed framework.

Three elements of tax knowledge were identified, namely, general, procedural and legal tax knowledge. General tax knowledge relates to a need to have a fiscal awareness; procedural tax knowledge refers to understanding tax compliance procedures; and legal tax knowledge pertains to a need to understand regulations.

The proposed framework may assist future research in providing a structured approach for assessing tax knowledge as a factor influencing tax compliance. The framework may also assist tax authorities in designing targeted tax education outreach programmes for taxpayers and improve their understanding of taxpayer behaviour to influence the compliance behaviour of its taxpayer population.

An acceptable and specific measurement of tax knowledge as a factor of tax-compliance behaviour has been proposed and tested as a tool for analysing and discussing taxpayers’ knowledge variables.

In this article, I examine the role of judicial narratives in constructing, constraining, and delimiting the boundaries of social scientific and expert knowledge – specifically, in the context of gay and lesbian parents’ custody and adoption cases. Examining not only the judicial narratives in appellate cases over the last fifty years in the United States, but also expert reports and briefs obtained from attorneys in these cases and interviews with judges, attorneys and litigants, I investigate the role of judicial narratives in adjudicating between competing social scientific claims about sexuality and child welfare, constructing expertise, and ultimately deciding what is valid knowledge and what is not. I focus specifically on the ways in which judges credit and discredit social scientific evidence, experts, and knowledge claims. The power of legal actors and particularly judges to police the boundaries of knowledge and expertise in the context of the custody case and the judicial narrative is complicated by the observation that this form of social scientific knowledge is not only the object acted upon and shaped by these power dynamics, but is also itself a source of power and legitimation.