ICAIL

The major goal of workers in the field of expert systems in law can be summarized as follows: through the use of computer technology, to make scarcs, human legal knowledge and expertise more widely available and easily accessible. This paper is directly ...

Conceptual retrieval requires the computer to have knowledge of legal concepts and issues, and their relationship to the case law collection. This paper discusses the organization of a case law knowledge base in terms of three interacting components: a ...

The ability to think like a lawyer is an often heard phrase but a vaguely understood phenomena. What is lawyer reasoning? Does it differ from reasoning in other fields and disciplines? This paper begins to answer these questions by explicating the ...

In this paper, we give an overview of our case-based reasoning program, HYPO, which operates in the field of trade secret law. We discuss key ingredients of case-based reasoning, in general, and the correspondence of these to elements of HYPO. We ...

An interesting and important aspect of legal reasoning is the use of citations to precedent cases as justifications for legal conclusions. In this paper, we describe the standard use of citations as described in the attorney's “Blue Book” and how HYPO, ...

The LEX (Legal Expert System) project is one of the European based projects investigating legal expert systems from both a professional and a teaching perspective. The project is a cooperative project between the University of Tübingen and IBM Germany ...

This report proposes that recent advances using low-level connectionist representations offer new possibilities to those interested in free text information retrieval (IR). The AIR system demonstrates that this representation suits the IR domain well, ...

The use of computers in Canadian tax planning has until now been concentrated on numerical analysis. The computer is indeed an excellent tool for calculating tax effects where the legal results of transactions are known. However, I maintain that it can ...

This paper describes the development of an expert system demonstration prototype for identifying legal issues within the domain of employee pension plans. Pension plans are submitted by employers to the Internal Revenue Service for approval as to ...

We are attempting to extract information automatically from large legal documents. SPADES is an expert system for screening pension plans submitted to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a task which has resisted prior automation attempts. Nearly all ...

This article contains a theory of normative defeasible reasoning based on the modal deontic logic 3-D. The concept of “relative weight” between competing norms is defined, and 3-D is used to formalize two types of legal reasoning (“subsumptive” and “...

In two interesting papers ((1983), (1986)) Thorne McCarty has presented a semantics for the central deontic concepts, permission and obligation, based upon a semantics for an action language. The latter, in turn, was constructed along lines deriving ...

This paper is based on a new approach for dealing with large scale software systems. This approach is based on the concept of a Law-Governed System, which is a triple

>program, users, law<

where the law is an explicit and strictly enforced set of rules ...

In the law, decisions in previous cases play a significant role in the presentation, understanding, and outcome of new cases. This is particularly true in the area of contract law where few statutes (explicit legal rules) exist. When presented with a ...

Oblog-2 is a hybrid knowledge representation system comparable to Krypton and KL-TWO. It combines a terminological reasoner with a Prolog-like inference mechanism. The terminological component supports the description of type and attribute taxonomies. ...

The characteristics of the ESPLEX system which may be defined as a “rule and conceptual based model” are illustrated, together with the possibilities for its utilization, its similarities with other existing projects, and the requisites of the knowledge ...

This paper addresses issues in the design of legal expert systems. The emphasis is on the nature of the underlying knowledge that is incorporated in the knowledge base of a legal expert system. Examples of different approaches are discussed. The “legal ...