Much work using argumentation frameworks treats arguments as entirely abstract, related by a uniform attack relation which always succeeds unless the attacker can itself be defeated. However, this does not seem adequate for legal argumentation. Some proposals have suggested regulating attack relations using preferences or values on arguments and which filter the attack relation, so that, depend...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to compare adults with and without dementia on capacities to consent to treatment as assessed by three instruments. DESIGN AND METHODS Eighty-eight older adults with mild to moderate dementia were compared with 88 matched controls on four indices of legal competency to consent to medical treatment as assessed with three capacity instruments. RESULTS Mea...

The aim of this paper is to analyze what kinds of temporal information can be found in different types of legal documents. In particular, it provides a comparison of different legal document types (case law, statute or transactional document) and how one can do further reasoning with the extracted temporal information.

Researchers have applied case-based reasoning to legal informatics in recent decades, yet real-world applications of case-based systems have been hampered by the need to manually create the case instances. To alleviate this problem, we propose algorithms for automatically generating and refining case instances from real-world judgment documents for criminal summary judgments. Our algorithms att...

In this paper I discuss the various justifications that can be given for components of a legal argument. First a number of different types of argument are described. These are used in legal reasoning, but cannot be satisfactorily reduced to deductive arguments. While deductive arguments have been fruitfully analysed in the literature, these other forms of arguments, and the ways in which they c...

In this paper we extend a formal framework presented in [6] to model reasoning across legal systems. In particular, we propose a logical system that encompasses the various interpretative interactions occurring between legal systems in the context of private international law. This is done by introducing meta-rules to reason with interpretive canons.

This paper provides a review of Rhetoric and the Rule of Law, by Neil MacCormick, focussing on the role of logic in legal reasoning. In particular it considers the connection between syllogism, formal methods and rhetoric, and it distinguishes various aspects of legal defeasibility.

This paper investigates the modelling of burden of proof in AI & law models of legal argument. The main topic is how allocations of burden of proof determine the required strength of counterarguments. It is argued that the two currently available approaches both have some shortcomings. On the one hand, techniques for modelling burden of proof in nonmonotonic logics do not allow for shifts of a ...

Transcripts of oral arguments before the US Supreme Court provide interesting examples of creative legal reasoning. They illustrate, often in dramatic fashion, a sophisticated process of concept formation and testing driven by skillful posing of hypothetical examples. From the viewpoint of legal education, however, taking advantage of this resource presents challenges. The underlying processes ...

Establishing and operating a virtual organization implies a number of challenges from many different perspectives, including socio-economic, organizational, legal and computational issues. This paper focuses on the legal aspects with a particular view on legal risks with respect to intellectual property rights. A risk analysis with respect to legal issues can either be based on abstract legal r...