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Precedent-based legal reasoning and knowledge acquisition in contract law: A process model

Published: 01 December 1987 Publication History

Abstract

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 new case, a lawyer must be able to identify important issues and make some predictions about how the case might be decided. The lawyer will often recall past cases which bear similarities to the current case and reason analogically to make these predictions. In order to perform these tasks, a lawyer must be able to remember past cases, organize them in memory so that cases that are conceptually similar are stored together (a lawyer normally won't be reminded of an irrelevant case), and make analogies between cases. Thus the organization and representation of knowledge in memory is crucial in building a model of lawyer's cognitive processes. This paper describes a process model, implemented in a computer program called STARE, which addresses these issues in the context of first-year law students learning contract law.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICAIL '87: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Artificial intelligence and law
December 1987
257 pages
ISBN:0897912306
DOI:10.1145/41735
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: 01 December 1987

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Thirty years of Artificial Intelligence and Law: the first decadeArtificial Intelligence and Law10.1007/s10506-022-09329-430:4(481-519)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2022
  • (2014)Narratives, Formalism, Computational Tools, and NonlinearityPart II of Essays Dedicated to Yaacov Choueka on Language, Culture, Computation. Computing of the Humanities, Law, and Narratives - Volume 800210.1007/978-3-642-45324-3_11(270-393)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2014
  • (2011)The Narrative DimensionComputer Applications for Handling Legal Evidence, Police Investigation and Case Argumentation10.1007/978-90-481-8990-8_5(323-481)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2011
  • (2007)Artificial Intelligence and Law: How to Get There from HereRatio Juris10.1111/j.1467-9337.1990.tb00057.x3:2(189-200)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2007
  • (1993)Representing teleological structure in case-based legal reasoningProceedings of the 4th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law10.1145/158976.158982(50-59)Online publication date: 1-Aug-1993
  • (1991)Developer's choice in the legal domainProceedings of the 3rd international conference on Artificial intelligence and law10.1145/112646.112685(307-309)Online publication date: 1-May-1991
  • (1991)On the role of prototypes in appellate legal argument (abstract)Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Artificial intelligence and law10.1145/112646.112668(185-190)Online publication date: 1-May-1991
  • (1991)Incorporating procedural context into a model of case-based legal reasoningProceedings of the 3rd international conference on Artificial intelligence and law10.1145/112646.112648(12-20)Online publication date: 1-May-1991
  • (1991)Argument moves in a rule-guided domainProceedings of the 3rd international conference on Artificial intelligence and law10.1145/112646.112647(1-11)Online publication date: 1-May-1991

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