OBJECTIVE To develop, implement, and evaluate a longitudinal, simulation-based ethics and legal curriculum designed specifically for otolaryngology residents. METHODS Otolaryngology residents were recruited to participate in a yearly half-day ethical-legal module, the curriculum of which spanned 4 years. Each module included: three simulated scenarios, small-group multisource feedback, and la...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study is to assess and evaluate the capacities for understanding, appreciation and reasoning of legal minors with psychiatric disorders and their parents and their competence to consent or assent to participation in clinical trials. The beliefs, fears, motivation and influencing factors for decision-making of legal minors and parents were also examined. METHODS Usin...

This paper deals with the role of abductive inference in legal reasoning. Both in the determination of the relevant facts and in the determination of their legal consequences abductive inference plays a crucial role, being the first step of such reasoning tasks. Two kinds of legal abduction are distinguished: an explanatory one aiming at the reconstruction of the relevant facts and a classifica...

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and...

Prakken [2] argues that we cannot formalize a switch of burden of proof in legal reasoning either by argumentation framework or by nonmonotonic reasoning since argumentation semantics can represent any nonmonotonic formalism. In this paper, we argue that a switch of burden of proof can be formalized in nonmonotonic reasoning by formalizing burden of proof in a different way followed by the Japa...

In this paper we propose a large case-based reasoner for the legal domain. Analyzing legal texts for indexing purposes makes the implementation of large case bases a complex task. We present a methodology to automatically convert legal texts into legal cases guided by domain expert knowledge in a rule-based system with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. This methodology can be genera...

EU-IST Integrated Project (IP) IST-2003-506826 SEKT Deliverable D3.5.2(WP3.5) In this document, we present an evaluation of the Multi-version Ontology Reasoning system MORE. The framework of MORE is developed based on a temporal logic approach. We take multiple versions of the legal ontology OPJK, one of the case studies in the SEKT project, as the test data set to test the prototype of the mul...

In this paper, we propose a legal reasoning system called PROLEG (PROlog based LEGal reasoning support system) based on the Japanese “theory of presupposed ultimate facts” (called “Yokenjijitsu-ron” in Japanese, the JUF theory, in short). The theory is used for decision making by judges under incomplete information. Previously, we proposed a translation of the theory into logic programming. How...

Over the past couple of decades, there have been great developments in the fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience that have allowed the advancement of our understanding of how people make judgements about causality in several domains. We provide a review of some of the contemporary psychological models of causal thinking that are directly relevant to legal reasoning. In addition, we co...

The notion of burden of proof and its companion notion of presumption are central to argumentation studies. This book argues that we can learn a lot from how the courts have developed procedures over the years for allocating and reasoning with presumptions and burdens of proof, and from how artifi cial intelligence has built precise formal and computational systems to represent this kind of rea...