[General concepts, such as ‘reasonableness’, ‘unconscionable conduct’ and ‘unfairness’, are used in a variety of ways by judges, commentators and in statute. Sometimes, general concepts are merely statements in the nature of a conclusion reached after a process of detailed legal reasoning has taken place. In many cases, however, general concepts themselves play a determinative role in legal ana...

Despite decades of development of formal tools for modelling legal knowledge and reasoning, the creation of a fully fledged legal decision support system remains challenging. Among those challenges, such system requires an enormous amount of commonsense knowledge to derive legal expertise. This paper describes the development of a negotiation decision support system (the Parenting Plan Support ...

Legislation grows in number and complexity, and so does the need to get informed about them, and to be able to infer the consequences of rules and requirements for particular situations. Access to legal sources has thus far been handled in the same way as information retrieval in general by using database technology. This misses out what is the crucial issue in legal information serving (LIS): ...

S The Tapestry of Reason Amalia Amaya Coherence theories of law and adjudication have been very popular in the last decades. Although these theories significantly advance the case for coherentism in law, a number of problems remain open in the current state of the coherence theory in law. This paper attempts to develop a coherencebased model of legal reasoning, which addresses, or at least miti...

Case-based reasoning in the law is a reasoning strategy in which legal conclusions are supported by decisions made by judges. If the case at hand is analogous to a settled case, then by judicial authority one can argue that the settled case should be followed. Case-based reasoning is a topic where ontology meets logic since one’s conception of cases determines one’s conception of reasoning with...