Why do policy-motivated justices conform to unfavorable precedents? This article suggests that two theories, social-legal backgrounds and precedential characteristics, help explain why justices support unfavorable precedents. To test the explanatory power of these theories, the article uses data from the 1953-94 terms that ascertains whether justices cast precedential votes. The results, after ...

In this paper, we develop a knowledge representation model for the innovative intelligent retrieval of legal cases, which provides effective legal case management. Examples are taken from the domain of accident compensation. A new set of sub-elements for legal case representation (sub-issues, pro-claimant, pro-respondent and contextual features) has been developed to extend the traditional repr...

Demographic studies of family relationships frequently equate household composition with family membership. High rates of divorce and parent-child separation challenge this assumption. Parental rights and responsibilities may continue even when parents and children live apart. This paper describes the legal and physical custody arrangements adopted by a repre.entatlve sample of recent divorce c...

The author reviewed the literature on legal risk management in patient care, and carried out research in two acute care hospitals. The hospital research involved auditing policies and procedures, interviewing key people in the hospital, reviewing external legal and policy trends, and examining selected complaints files and legal cases. The results were used to develop a 'typology' of legal risk...

Federal appellate judges cite cases by sister circuits. Why is that? Common wisdom holds that judges look to out-of-circuit cases for credible legal arguments -as persuasive precedent. But hard-core adherents of the attitudinal model (Segal and Spaeth 2002) – and certain cynical realists and critical legal studies scholars – might argue that judges decide in accordance with their policy or poli...

A common approach in teaching law is to make use of invented cases which have to be solved by students. This is seen as a method of learning the basic legal concepts in a certain field. The problem with this way of teaching is that teachers do not instruct students in how to solve cases in general nor how to solve cases in a specific area. There also is not enough time in the regular curriculum...

The paper has two goals: firstly, we explain how ontology mapping formalisms can be used to denote the many interpretations of a given legal concept; secondly, we provide a short case, justifying the potential need of using such formalisms in modern legal knowledge models. This approach may be especially useful for coding knowledge about specific legal cases.