Recent developments in the forensic sciences have confronted the field of legal reasoning with the new challenge of reasoning under uncertainty. Forensic results come with uncertainty and are described in terms of likelihood ratios and random match probabilities. The legal field is unfamiliar with numerical valuations of evidence, which has led to confusion and in some cases to serious miscarri...

Fifty years of effort in artificial intelligence (AI) and the formalization of legal reasoning have produced both successes and failures. Considerable success in organizing and displaying evidence and its interrelationships has been accompanied by failure to achieve the original ambition of AI as applied to law: fully automated legal decision-making. The obstacles to formalizing legal reasoning...

American legal realism was committed to examining legal reasoning in terms of the actual experiences of judges. Because the realist project sought to use social science tools to examine human nature, the contemporary rise of cognitive neuroscience provides an occasion for reexamining legal realism’s foundational critique of the law. Realism’s attempt to examine “the actual facts of judicial beh...

Riveret et al. have proposed a framework for probabilistic legal reasoning. Their goal is to determine the chance of winning a court case, given the probabilities of the judge accepting certain claimed facts and legal rules. In this paper we tackle the same problem by defining and implementing a new formalism, called probabilistic argumentation logic, which can be seen as a probabilistic genera...

Valid conclusions can be defeated if people can think of conditions that prevent the consequent to occur although the antecedent is given. The goal of the present research was to investigate how people consider these conditions when reasoning with legal conditionals such as "If a person kills another human, then this person should be punished for manslaughter." In Experiments 1 and 2 legal cond...

The two different categories of legal AI system are described, and legal analysis systems are chosen as objects of study. So-called judgment machines are discussed, but it is decided that research in legal AI systems would be best carried-out in the area of legal expert systems. The process of legal reasoning is briefly examined, and two different methods of legal knowledge representation are d...

The two different categories of legal Al system are described, and legal analysis systems are chosen as objects of study. So-called judgment machines are discussed, but it is decided that research in legal Al systems would be. best carried-out in the area of legal expert systems. The process of legal reasoning is briefly examined, and two difforent methods of legal knowledge representation are ...

In the evidential reasoning of human beings, stories play a role in providing an analytic account of the facts. In a legal aspect, the approach of legal reasoning, based on the notion of narratives with evidence, needs to be investigated and supported. The study aims to understand how lawyers cognitively process e-discovery cases, in order to find out the use of narrative in the e-discovery of ...

The rule of law rests on the quality of legal reasoning. The rule of law requires that similar cases should be decided similarly, that each case should be decided on its merits, and that decision-making processes should comply with applicable rules of procedure and evidence. Making the reasoning behind such decision-making transparent and open to scrutiny shifts the decisions away from mere sub...

In Populations, Public Health and the Law, legal scholar Wendy Parmet urges courts to embrace population-based legal analysis, a public health inspired approach to legal reasoning. Parmet contends that population-based legal analysis offers a way to analyze legal issues--not unlike law and economics--as well as a set of values from which to critique contemporary legal discourse. Population-base...