background:death due to acute poisoning is of medical, legal and social significance. this study was designed to investigate lethal poisonings among dead bodies referred to a regional office of iranian legal medicine organization (ilmo). methods:this was a retrospective descriptive-analytical study on dead bodies referred to fars province regional office of ilmo in shiraz, iran, during april 20...

To compare discourse differences in American and English/Welsh legal cases, we conducted a discriminant function analysis along five indices of cohesion on a specially constructed corpus. Our results suggest substantial differences, casting doubt on previous generalizations about British and American writing. Our results also offer guidance to developers of legal English textbooks and drafters ...

Legal reasoning is one of the most obvious application areas for computational models of argumentation as the exchange of arguments and counterarguments is the established means for making decisions in law. In this paper we employ Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP) for representing legal cases and for giving decision-support, exemplary for private law. We give a formalization of legal provisio...

The paper reports the outcomes of a study with law school students to annotate a corpus of legal cases for a variety of annotation types, e.g. citation indices, legal facts, rationale, judgement, cause of action, and others. An online tool is used by a group of annotators that results in an annotated corpus. Differences amongst the annotations are curated, producing a gold standard corpus of an...

Users of commercial legal information retrieval (IR) systems often want argument retrieval (AR): retrieving not merely sentences with highlighted terms, but arguments and argument-related information. Using a corpus of argumentannotated legal cases, we conducted a baseline study of current legal IR systems in responding to standard queries. We identify ways in which they cannot meet the need fo...

Predicting the outcome or the probability of winning a legal case has always been highly attractive in legal sciences and practice. Hardly any attempt has been made to predict the outcome of German cases, although prior court decisions become more and more important in various legal domains of Germany’s jurisdiction, e.g., tax law. This paper summarizes our research on training a machine learni...