In this paper we discuss how different levels of reasoning can occur in legal cases. We build upon our recent work in which we have reconstructed the reasoning of the majority and dissenting opinions for a particular case through the use of Belief-DesireIntention (BDI) agents to replicate the contrasting views involved in the actual decision. This reconstruction has shown how the reasoning invo...

Uptake of Artificial Intelligence approaches in commercial practice has been low. By contrast, “Copyright by design” (DRM) and “Privacy by Design” have emerged as (commercially) successful applications of computer technology to legal issues, and are now closer to realizing the formalist ideal of a self-enforcing law than traditional approaches to legal AI and their attempt to model legal reason...

Causation looms large in legal and moral reasoning. People construct causal models of the social and physical world to understand what has happened, how and why, and to allocate responsibility and blame. This chapter explores people’s commonsense notion of causation, and shows how it underpins moral and legal judgments. As a guiding framework it uses the causal model framework (Pearl, 2000) roo...

We build on the analogy between theorem proving and legal reasoning. In the former case it was shown that mechanized reasoning is always achieved provided there is a theory, a control on this theory and some rules governing this controlled theory once introduced in a given environment. We show that it is possible to identify similar conditions for cognitive systems and also in the legal world. ...

In this paper we use the notion of argument schemes to analyse some leading approaches to case-based reasoning in Law. We identify a set of argument schemes that can express the argument provided by such systems and draw attention to some important differences between the various approaches.

How do people make legal judgments based on complex bodies of interrelated evidence? This paper outlines a novel framework for evidential reasoning using causal idioms. These idioms are based on the qualitative graphical component of Bayesian networks, and are tailored to the legal context. They can be combined and reused to model complex bodies of legal evidence. This approach is applied to wi...

There are two competing views on what makes propositions of law true. The one, legal realism, takes it that propositions of law are true because they reflect an independently existing reality of legal facts. These facts would be generated by legal rules which would operate autonomously, without need for human intervention. The institutional theory of law illustrates this view. On this view it i...

In previous work we presented argumentation schemes to capture the CATO and value based theory construction approaches to reasoning with legal cases with factors. We formalised the schemes with ASPIC+, a formal representation of instantiated argumentation. In ASPIC+ the premises of a scheme may either be a factor provided in a knowledge base or established using a further argumentation scheme. ...

Abstract Dialetical Frameworks (ADFs) are a recent development in computational argumentation which are, it has been suggested, a fruitful way of implementing factor based reasoning with legal cases. In this paper we evaluate this proposal, by reconstructing CATO using ADFs. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the program, transpa...

in analyzing the scholarly achievements, muslim writers make extensive use of biography books. the information of people’s life and their geographical conditions, which are included in their specific intellectual inclinations, is usually extracted from these books, which can be used for quantitative analysis for presenting a portray of the overall figure of a society, in general, and its academ...