Ail

The avowed topic of this book is information retrieval (IR), although, as we shall see, it is also highly relevant to support for document drafting. The IR motivation is obvious. When confronted with a legal problem one believes that somewhere among the statutes, judicial decisions and literature, there is the information which one requires to solve the problem, if only it can be found. Traditionally IR is carried out by boolean keyword searching, which returns a list of documents, assessed by the measures of “relevance”–the percentage of ...

Diagnosis theory reasons about incomplete knowledge and only considers the past. It distinguishes between violations and non-violations. Qualitative decision theory reasons about decision variables and considers the future. It distinguishes between fulfilled goals and unfulfilled goals. In this paper we formalize normative diagnoses and decisions in the special purpose formalism DIO(DE)² as well as in extensions of the preference-based deontic logic PDL. The DIagnostic and DEcision-theoretic framework for DEontic reasoning DIO(DE)² formalizes reasoning about violations and fulfillments, and is used to characterize the distinction between normative diagnosis theory and (qualitative) decision theory. The extension of the preference-based deontic logic PDL shows how normative diagnostic and decision-theoretic reasoning -- i.e. reasoning about violations and fulfillments -- can be formalized as an extension of deontic reasoning.

Case-based reasoning has played an important role in legal reasoning systems. As one criteria for similarity of cases, temporal relationsamong affairs in legal cases should be compared. Thus far in many legalreasoning systems, cases have been described as sequences of pointwiseevents, or at best, simple time intervals, and they have been related bypredicates such as before, after, while,and so on. However, such relations may depend on each implementer'spersonal view, and also require much labor to write down by hand. In this paper, we first propose a classification of affair types by their temporal features, and according to those types, we propose several assumption rules that prescribe the temporal relations between affair types. The temporal relations are automatically generated by these rules. Thereafter, we discuss how thesetemporal relations work in the comparison of similarity of cases. Inthe process of comparison, inadequate temporal relations need to beamended. For thi...

In his paper based on his invited speech at the conference, Trevor Bench-Capon reviews the topic of argument as addressed in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Bench-Capon opposes arguments to logical proofs. He considers formal logic as an abstraction which is designed to deal ...

Between 1988 and 1991 the European Community funded a Basic Research Working Group on the Foundations of Legal Reasoning. This group, mostly lawyers, but with a few computer scientists, and a couple of philosophers, met twice a year to discuss such topics as the feasibility of producing formal models of law, and the extent to which such models were amenable to computation. This book is a selection of fourteen papers from that project. It is not a collective view, nor a systematic summary of conclusions, but rather a set of ...