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)

Previous research into the formalisation of statute law identified a number of uses of language which posed problems for formalisation. A previous paper argued that these uses establish the requirement that a formalisation be isomorphic, but noted that this has odd consequences. This paper expands on what these consequences are and argues that they undermine the very idea of formalisation. Therefore, the whole argument constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of formalising statute law. The paper provides reasons why (...) this activity is impossible and places the conclusion in the context of the development of modem logic, in which context it appears uncontroversial. (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)

Autonomous vehicles are one of the most spectacular recent developments of Artificial Intelligence. Among the problems that still need to be solved before they can fully autonomously participate in traffic is the one of making their behaviour conform to the traffic laws. This paper discusses this problem by way of a case study of Dutch traffic law. First it is discussed to what extent Dutch traffic law exhibits features that are traditionally said to pose challenges for AI & Law models, (...) such as exceptions, rule conflicts, open texture and vagueness, rule change, and the need for commonsense knowledge. Then three approaches to the design of law-conforming AV are evaluated in light of the challenges posed by Dutch traffic law, which includes an assessment of the usefulness of AI & Law models of nonmonotonic reasoning, argumentation and case-based reasoning. (shrink)

This paper presents a new language for isomorphic representations of legalknowledge in feature structures. The language includes predefinedstructures based on situation theory for common-sense categories, andpredefined structures based on Van Kralingens frame-based conceptualmodelling language for legal rules. It is shown that the flexibility of thefeature-structure formalism can exploited to allow for structure-preservingrepresentations of non-primitive concepts, and to enable various types ofinteraction and cross- reference between language elements. A fragment of theDutch Opium Act is used to illustrate how modelling and reasoning (...) proceed in practice. (shrink)

As an introduction to our work, we emphasize the parallel interpretation of abstract tools and the concepts of undetermined and vague information. Imprecision, uncertainty and their relationships are inspected. Suitable interpretations of the fuzzy sets theory are applied to legal phenomena in an attempt to clearly circumscribe the possible applications of the theory. The fundamental notion of reference sets is examined in detail, hence highlighting their importance. A systematic and combinatorial classification of the relevant subsets of the legal field is (...) supplied for practical application. Although the use of the fuzzy sets theory is sometimes suggested as a palliative measure (no competition exists), it can also be complementary (serve as a building block to improve modelisation). An Appendix gives a brief recall of the key-concepts of the axiomatic theory of fuzziness and its developments: fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, fuzzy control and theory of possibility. (shrink)

A representation methodology for knowledge allowing multiple interpretations is described. It is based on the following conception of legal knowledge and its open texture. Since indeterminate, legal knowledge must be adapted to fit the circumstances of the cases to which it is applied. Whether a certain adaptation is lawful or not is measured by metaknowledge. But as this too is indeterminate, its adaptation to the case must be measured by metametaknowledge, etc. This hierarchical model of law is quite well-established and (...) may serve well as a basis for a legal knowledge system. To account for the indeterminacy of law such a system should support the construction of different arguments for and against various interpretations of legal sources. However, automatizing this reasoning fully is unsound since it would imply a restriction to arguments defending interpretations anticipated at programming time. Therefore, the system must be interactive and the user''s knowledge be furnished in a principled way. Contrary to the widespread opinion that classical logic is inadequate for representing open-textured knowledge, the framework outlined herein is given a formalization in first order logic. (shrink)

There is more to legal knowledge representation than knowledge-bases. It is valuable to look at legal knowledge representation and its implementation across the entire domain of computerisation of law, rather than focussing on sub-domains such as legal expert systems. The DataLex WorkStation software and applications developed using it are used to provide examples. Effective integration of inferencing, hypertext and text retrieval can overcome some of the limitations of these current paradigms of legal computerisation which are apparent when they are used (...) on a stand-alone basis. Effective integration of inferencing systems is facilitated by use of a (quasi) natural language knowledge representation, and the benefits of isomorphism are enhanced. These advantages of integration apply to all forms of inferencing, including document generation and casebased inferencing. Some principles for development of integrated legal decision support systems are proposed. (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.

The Pleadings Game is a normative formalization and computational model of civil pleading, founded in Roberty Alexy''s discourse theory of legal argumentation. The consequences of arguments and counterarguments are modelled using Geffner and Pearl''s nonmonotonic logic,conditional entailment. Discourse in focussed using the concepts of issue and relevance. Conflicts between arguments can be resolved by arguing about the validity and priority of rules, at any level. The computational model is fully implemented and has been tested using examples from Article Nine of (...) the Uniform Commercial Code. (shrink)

The notion of validity fulfils a crucial role in legal theory. In the emerging Web 3.0, Semantic Web languages, legal ontologies, and normative multi-agent systems are designed to cover new regulatory needs. Conceptual models for complex regulatory systems shape the characteristic features of rules, norms, and principles in different ways. This article outlines one of such multilayered governance models, designed for the CAPER platform, and offers a definition of Semantic Web Regulatory Models . It distinguishes between normative-SWRM and institutional-SWRM. It (...) also compares existing principles in privacy by design, linked open data , legal information institutes , and online dispute resolution . The article concludes by proposing the notion of Relational Law to summarize the ethical dimension of SWRM. Ethics are the only regulatory way to constitute a global space, out of the jurisdictional public domain set by national, international, or transnational law, and opposed to the private one. (shrink)

This paper attempts to formalize the differences between two methods of analysis used by judicial opinions in common law jurisdictions to contradict holdings posited by earlier opinions: “disagreeing” with the holdings of the earlier opinions and “attributing” holdings to the prior opinions. The paper will demonstrate that it is necessary to model both methods of analysis differently to generate an accurate picture of the state of legal authority in hypothetical examples, as well as in an example based on Barry Friedman’s (...) analysis of the “stealth overruling” of Miranda v. Arizona through subsequent judicial interpretations. Because the question of whether “disagreement” and “attribution” need to be modeled separately relates to contradictions rather than to subtler interactions between holdings such as “distinguishing,” it can be answered using the simple technique of modeling holdings as propositional variables and evaluating the holdings using truth tables. (shrink)

Logic-based approaches to legal problem solving model the rule-governed nature of legal argumentation, justification, and other legal discourse but suffer from two key obstacles: the absence of efficient, scalable techniques for creating authoritative representations of legal texts as logical expressions; and the difficulty of evaluating legal terms and concepts in terms of the language of ordinary discourse. Data-centric techniques can be used to finesse the challenges of formalizing legal rules and matching legal predicates with the language of ordinary parlance by (...) exploiting knowledge latent in legal corpora. However, these techniques typically are opaque and unable to support the rule-governed discourse needed for persuasive argumentation and justification. This paper distinguishes representative legal tasks to which each approach appears to be particularly well suited and proposes a hybrid model that exploits the complementarity of each. (shrink)

The first issue of _Artificial Intelligence and Law_ journal was published in 1992. This special issue marks the 30th anniversary of the journal by reviewing the progress of the field through thirty commentaries on landmark papers and groups of papers from that journal.

We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into (...) a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go. (shrink)

This paper presents a methodology to design and implement programs intended to decide cases, described as sets of factors, according to a theory of a particular domain based on a set of precedent cases relating to that domain. We useDialectical Frameworks, a recent development in AI knowledge representation, as the central feature of our design method. ADFs will play a role akin to that played by Entity–Relationship models in the design of database systems. First, we explain how the factor hierarchy (...) of the well-known legal reasoning system CATO can be used to instantiate an ADF for the domain of US Trade Secrets. This is intended to demonstrate the suitability of ADFs for expressing the design of legal cased based systems. The method is then applied to two other legal domains often used in the literature of AI and Law. In each domain, the design is provided by the domain analyst expressing the cases in terms of factors organised into an ADF from which an executable program can be implemented in a straightforward way by taking advantage of the closeness of the acceptance conditions of the ADF to components of an executable program. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the performance and efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the program and the transparency of the reasoning. This evaluation suggests ways in which factor based systems, which are limited by taking as their starting point the representation of cases as sets of factors and so abstracting away the particular facts, can be extended to address open issues in AI and Law by incorporating the case facts to improve the decision, and by considering justification and reasoning using portion of precedents. (shrink)

Problem setting. New complex challenges of the present, including transformation and complication of heterogeneity and entropy of the Internet space, intensive development of robotics, technologies of artificial intelligence, can not but affect the state and development of the entire legal system of the state and legislation in various spheres of public relations. It is necessary to formulate criteria for a typology of legal problems that can be solved by digital formalization, and which require the use of the potential of "personal (...) knowledge" to which intuition and practical experience are involved, etc. Recent research and publications analysis. The results of studies of these problems make it possible to point out that, as a whole, a systematic scientific understanding of the complex, voluminous and multidimensional problem of clarifying the perspectives and limits of the technological approach in professional legal practice, legal expert activity, influence on the transformation of legal norms, jurisprudence and legal education and the like need further careful study. The rapid development of new technologies, in particular artificial intelligence technologies, the Internet of Things, cloud technologies, etc., is contributing to changes in current legislation. Today, advanced economies are already pondering the question of regulating the status and use of AI technologies. While these are only the first bold steps, in the future, all of these can affect global changes in the legal system - perhaps full-fledged comprehensive institutions of law and institutions of law, even the branches and branches of law. Paper objectiv. The purpose of this article is to consideration of certain aspects of digitization of law and the limits of possible and admissible in the technological approach to legal knowledge on the basis of the results of understanding of this problem by different representatives of the humanities and interdisciplinary researchers. Paper main body. The article substantiates the importance and methodology of the technological approach in law, the limits of the use of this approach. It is shown that since the intensive development of innovative technologies, their widespread adoption in various spheres of public life is a significant factor in the development of modern society, this gradually leads to the formation of a new "digital" reality. It is disclosed that innovative technologies are not only potentially applicable, but have long been effectively used in the legal sphere, due to which, in particular, the correct and quick solution of various tasks is ensured, which contributes to more efficient provision of legal services, ensuring professional legal practice, etc. It is revealed that in the new reality, law becomes not only a means, a tool that provides digitalization of the economy, management and other segments of society, but also the object of digitalization, as a result of which it experiences changes in its form, content, system, structure, mechanism of action and demonstrates tendencies to strengthen these transformations. Conclusions of the research. In the face of new reality, law becomes not only a means, a tool that ensures the digitization of the economy, governance and other segments of social life, but also the object of digitalization, in which it changes its form, content, system, structure, mechanism of action and demonstrates a tendency to enhance these transformations. The following are legally and in fact possible and relevant directions and forms of the use of artificial intelligence technologies in legal practice, in particular in the judiciary: information and documentary support of legal practice, which includes automated intellectual classification of legal documents, formation and documentation of cases, elaboration through the use of artificial intelligence technologies of projects of solutions to various legal problems by means of using and analyzing databases; intellectual expert-analytical support of legal practice by comparison of technologies of artificial intelligence of norms of law, comparison of normative legal acts in order to determine their hierarchy, establishment of norms and acts of higher legal force from among those that are compared; generating and issuing expert assessments within the framework of forensic expertise or specialist opinion, automated systems for supporting legal decisions based on artificial intelligence); facilitating decision-making on large volumes of heterogeneous tasks in difficult uncertainty conditions, based on inaccurate, insufficient or poorly structured information. (shrink)