Case-based reasoning and its implications for legal expert systems

Abstract

Reasoners compare problems to prior cases to draw conclusions about a problem and guide decision making. All Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) employs some methods for generalizing from cases to support indexing and relevance assessment and evidences two basic inference methods: constraining search by tracing a solution from a past case or evaluating a case by comparing it to past cases. Across domains and tasks, however, humans reason with cases in subtly different ways evidencing different mixes of and mechanisms for these components.In recent CBR research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), five paradigmatic approaches have emerged: statistically-oriented, model-based, planning/design-oriented, exemplar-based, and adversarial or precedent-based. The paradigms differ in the assumptions they make about domain models, the extent to which they support symbolic case comparison, and the kinds of inferences for which they employ cases.Reasoning with cases is important in legal practice of all kinds, and legal practice involves a wide variety of case-based tasks and methods. The paradigms' respective benefits and costs suggest different approaches for different legal tasks.CBR research and development in the field of AI and Law should be pursued vigoriously for several reasons. CBR can supplement rule-based expert systems, improving their abilities to reason about statutory'predicates, solve problems efficiently, and explain their results. CBR can also contribute to the design of intelligent legal data retrieval systems and improve legal document assembly programs. Finally, in cognitive studies of various fields, it can model methods of transforming ill-structured problems into better structured ones through the use of case comparisons.

Can Artificial Intelligence and Online Dispute Resolution enhance efficiency and effectiveness in Courts

“…Using the principle of stare decisis, to make a decision in a new case, legal decision-makers search for the most similar case decided at the same or higher level in the hierarchy. A comprehensive discussion of the application of this approach to the legal domain is provided in Ashley (1992).…”

Intelligent Computer Evaluation of Offender’s Previous Record

“…One can do the same in a computer system, thus combining a rule-based and a case-based approach. For an overview of the use of the case-based paradigm in law see Ashley (1992). Previous work on hybrid systems in the legal domain (but not in the area of sentencing) is Rissland and Skalak (1989).…”

A knowledge-based approach for business process reengineering, SHAMASH

“…There have been already some approaches to apply AI to BPR such as ontology definitions [7,24,28], planning [13], multi-agent systems [8]. With respect to representing organisation standards, there is a lot of related work on computer systems for legal support, that require to represent laws using different techniques like case-based reasoning (CBR) [3], ontologies [23], and also automatically reason them [5,27].…”