The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper offers some commentaries on papers drawn from the Journal’s third decade. They indicate a major shift within Artificial Intelligence, both generally and in AI and Law: away from symbolic techniques to those based on Machine Learning approaches, especially those based on Natural Language texts rather than feature sets. Eight papers are discussed: two concern the management and use of documents available on the World Wide Web, (...) and six apply machine learning techniques to a variety of legal applications. (shrink)

Various due process provisions designed for use by civil servants in administrative decision-making may become redundant when automated decision-making is taken into use in public administration. Problems with mechanisms of good government, responsibility and liability for automated decisions and the rule of law require attention of the law-maker in adapting legal provisions to this new form of decision-making. Although the general data protection regulation of the European Union is important in acknowledging automated decision-making, most of the legal safeguards within administrative (...) due process have to be provided for by the national law-maker. It is suggested that all countries have a need to review their rules of administrative due process with a view to bringing them up to date regarding the requirements of automated decision-making. In whichever way the legislation is framed, the key issues are that persons who develop the algorithm and the code as well as persons who run or deal with the software within public authorities are aware of the preventive safeguards of legality in the context of automated decision-making, not only of the reactive safeguards constituted by the complaint procedures, and that legal mechanisms exist under which these persons can be held accountable and liable for decisions produced by automated decision-making. It is also argued that only rule-based systems of automatized decision-making are compatible with the rule of law and that there is a general interest in preventing a development into a rule of algorithm. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the cases, comparing different ways of representing cases, and formalising precedential reasoning. One introduces a method of analysing arguments that was to become very widely used in AI and Law, namely (...) argumentation schemes. Two relate to ontologies for the representation of legal concepts and two take advantage of the increasing availability of legal corpora in this decade, to automate document summarisation and for the mining of arguments. (shrink)

The General Data Protection Regulation is a European Union regulation that will replace the existing Data Protection Directive on 25 May 2018. The most significant change is a huge increase in the maximum fine that can be levied for breaches of the regulation. Yet fewer than half of UK companies are fully aware of GDPR—and a number of those who were preparing for it stopped doing so when the Brexit vote was announced. A last-minute rush to become compliant is therefore (...) expected, and numerous companies are starting to offer advice, checklists and consultancy on how to comply with GDPR. In such an environment, artificial intelligence technologies ought to be able to assist by providing best advice; asking all and only the relevant questions; monitoring activities; and carrying out assessments. The paper considers four areas of GDPR compliance where rule based technologies and/or machine learning techniques may be relevant: Following compliance checklists and codes of conduct; Supporting risk assessments; Complying with the new regulations regarding technologies that perform automatic profiling; Complying with the new regulations concerning recognising and reporting breaches of security. It concludes that AI technology can support each of these four areas. The requirements that GDPR state for explanation and justification of reasoning imply that rule-based approaches are likely to be more helpful than machine learning approaches. However, there may be good business reasons to take a different approach in some circumstances. (shrink)

dialectical frameworks have been introduced as a formalism for modeling argumentation allowing general logical satisfaction conditions and the relevant argument evaluation. Different criteria used to settle the acceptance of arguments are called semantics. Semantics of ADFs have so far mainly been defined based on the concept of admissibility. However, the notion of strongly admissible semantics studied for abstract argumentation frameworks has not yet been introduced for ADFs. In the current work we present the concept of strong admissibility of interpretations for (...) ADFs. Further, we show that strongly admissible interpretations of ADFs form a lattice with the grounded interpretation as the maximal element. We also present algorithms to answer the following decision problems: whether a given interpretation is a strongly admissible interpretation of a given ADF, and whether a given argument is strongly acceptable/deniable in a given interpretation of a given ADF. In addition, we show that the strongly admissible semantics of ADFs forms a proper generalization of the strongly admissible semantics of AFs. (shrink)

This paper explores the question of whether or not the law is a computable number in the sense described by Alan Turing in his 1937 paper ‘On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.’ Drawing upon the legal, social, and political context of Alan Turing’s own involvement with the law following his arrest in 1952 for the criminal offence of gross indecency, the article explores the parameters of computability within the law and analyses the applicability of Turing’s computability thesis (...) within the context of legal decision-making. (shrink)

In previous work, I showed how the “reason model” of precedential constraint could naturally be generalized from the standard setting in which it was first developed to a richer setting in which dimensional information is represented as well. Surprisingly, it then turned out that, in this new dimensional setting, the reason model of constraint collapsed into the “result model,” which supports only a fortiori reasoning. The purpose of this note is to suggest a modification of the reason model of constraint (...) that distinguishes it from the result model even in the dimensional setting. (shrink)

The first issue of _Artificial Intelligence and Law_ journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on landmark papers from the first decade of that journal. The topics discussed include reasoning with cases, argumentation, normative reasoning, dialogue, representing legal knowledge and neural networks.

In this introduction I give an overview of Carole Hafner’s work and discuss the papers in this volume. The final section offers some more personal reminiscences of Carole and her contribution to the AI and Law community, from myself and other colleagues.

This paper is an introduction to a virtual special issue of AI and Law exploring the legacy of the influential HYPO system of Rissland and Ashley. The papers included are: Arguments and cases: An inevitable intertwining, BankXX: Supporting legal arguments through heuristic retrieval, Modelling reasoning with precedents in a formal dialogue Game, A note on dimensions and factors, An empirical investigation of reasoning with legal cases through theory construction and application, Automatically classifying case texts and predicting outcomes, A factor-based definition (...) of precedential constraint and An improved factor based approach to precedential constraint. After describing HYPO, in this introduction to the special issue I look at various aspects of its influence on AI and Law: the developments led by Rissland at Amherst; the developments led by Ashley in Pittsburgh; the expression of these ideas in terms of rule based systems, and their subsequent formalisation; value based theories, which were inspired by a critique of HYPO; and contemporary approaches which revive the idea of dimensions. (shrink)

The third of Berman and Hafner’s early nineties papers on reasoning with legal cases concerned temporal context, in particular the evolution of case law doctrine over time in response to new cases and against a changing background of social values and purposes. In this paper we consider the ways in which changes in case law doctrine can be accommodated in a recently proposed methodology for encapsulating case law theories, and relate these changes the sources of change identified by Berman and (...) Hafner. (shrink)

The international debate on the ethics and legality of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) as well as the call for a ban are primarily focused on the nebulous concept of fully autonomous AWS. More specifically, on AWS that are capable of target selection and engagement without human supervision or control. This thesis argues that such a conception of autonomy is divorced both from military planning and decision-making operations as well as the design requirements that govern AWS engineering and subsequently the tracking (...) and tracing of moral responsibility. To do this, this thesis marries two different levels of meaningful human control (MHC), termed levels of abstraction, to couple military operations with design ethics. In doing so, this thesis argues that the contentious notion of ‘full’ autonomy is not problematic under this two-tiered understanding of MHC. It proceeds to propose the value sensitive design (VSD) approach as a means for designing for MHC. (shrink)