No abstract

Dialetical Frameworks (ADFs) are a recent development in computational argumentation which are, it has been suggested, a fruitful way of implementing theories of case law expressed in terms of factors. In this paper we evaluate this proposal, by representing the CATO analysis using ADFs. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the program, transparency of the reasoning, relation to formal argumentation techniques, and transferability across domains 1 .

No abstract

The ANGELIC methodology was developed to encapsulate knowledge of particular legal domains. In this paper we describe its use to build a full scale practical application intended to be used internally by Weightmans, a large firm of legal practitioners with branches throughout the UK. We describe the domain, Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL), the intended task, the sources used, the stages in development and the resulting application. An assessment of the project and its potential for further development is discussed. The project shows that current academic research using computational models of argument can prove useful to legal practitioners confronted by real legal tasks.

In this paper we revisit reasoning with legal cases, with a view to articulating the relationships between issues, factors, facts and values, and to identifying areas for future work on these topics. We start from the different ways in which attempts have been made to go beyond a fortori reasoning from the precedent base, so that conclusions not fully justified by the precedents can be drawn. We then use a particular example domain taken from the literature to illustrate our preferred approach and to relate factors and values. From this we observe that much current work depends critically on the ascription of factors to cases in a Boolean manner, while in practice there are compelling reasons to see the presence of factors as a matter of degree. On the basis of our observations we make suggestions for the directions of future work on this topic.