This paper addresses the design of an automated legal assistant capable of performing a logical analysis of legal documents and using natural language as a medium of communication with a human client. We focus on the interplay between natural language in which the legal document is expressed and the formal logic used for reasoning about it — ideally approached using a controlled natural languag...

Reasoning about causation in fact is an essential element of attributing legal responsibility. Therefore, the automation of the attribution of legal responsibility requires a modelling effort aimed at the following: a thorough understanding of the relation between the legal concepts of responsibility and of causation in fact; a thorough understanding of the relation between causation in fact an...

In this paper we attempt to give an account of reasoning with legal cases contextualised within a general theory of persuasion in practical reasoning. We begin by presenting our general theory, concentrating on the variety of ways in which a particular position can be attacked. We then apply our theory to the legal domain, illustrating our approach by a case study based on the well known CATO s...

This project description focuses on a specific occurrence of normative conflicts. It addresses the need of deciding the applicable law when conflicting pieces of legislation coming from different legal systems have to be merged. I will check whether and how the argumentation method could help to deal with these cases of normative interactions. Actually, from the logical point of view, the situa...

In this paper we use our previous work which has examined the different levels involved in reasoning about legal cases to examine some challenges to the relevance of current theoretical work in AI and Law made by Branting. In our model we view the process of legal reasoning as being divided into three distinct but interconnected levels of reasoning. These levels involve a bottom layer concernin...

In this paper we describe the heart of HARNESS, a legal knowledge system that is developed in the ESTRELLA project. This heart consists of a reasoning engine that performs legal assessment tasks, i.e. determining whether some case violates and/or complies with legal norms. This assessment module uses three knowledge bases cast in OWL 2: a domain ontology, a set of norms and a case description. ...