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Helping law students to understand US Supreme Court oral arguments: a planned experiment

Published: 06 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

The transcripts of oral arguments before the US Supreme Court provide interesting opportunities from the viewpoint of legal education. As the pinnacle of legal argumentation, they illustrate, often in dramatic fashion, a sophisticated process of concept formation and testing driven by skillful posing of hypotheticals. Yet it is not easy to get beginning law students to understand the arguments and the underlying processes of hypothesis formation and testing. We introduce a novel project with the dual aims of developing an AI model of concept formation and testing as well as an intelligent tutoring system for beginning law students. We describe a planned experiment in which we will evaluate to what extent law students' study of the Supreme Court oral arguments can be improved by providing detailed and specific self-explanation prompts. It is hypothesized that detailed prompts to explain connections between tests, rationales, dimensions, and hypotheticals will help students to induce adequate mental models of concept formation processes.

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  • (2013)Operationalizing the Continuum between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems for Educational TechnologyIEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies10.1109/TLT.2013.166:3(258-270)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2013
  1. Helping law students to understand US Supreme Court oral arguments: a planned experiment

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    ICAIL '05: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law
    June 2005
    270 pages
    ISBN:1595930817
    DOI:10.1145/1165485
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 06 June 2005

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    • (2024)Relationship between artificial intelligence and legal education: A bibliometric analysisKnowledge and Performance Management10.21511/kpm.08(2).2024.028:2(13-27)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2024
    • (2013)Operationalizing the Continuum between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems for Educational TechnologyIEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies10.1109/TLT.2013.166:3(258-270)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2013

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