Ail

We discuss several aspects of legal arguments, primarily arguments about the meaning of statutes. First, we discuss how the requirements of argument guide the specification and selection of supporting cases and how an existing case base influences argument formation. Second, we present,our evolving taxonomy of patterns of actual legal argument. This taxonomy builds upon our much earlier work on ‘argument moves” and also on our more recent analysis of how cases are used to support arguments for the interpretation of legal statutes. Third, we show how the theory of argument used by CABARET, a hybrid case-based/rule-based reasoner, can support many of the argument patterns in our taxonomy.

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 ...