Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules

As part of the Jurix 2010 conference in Liverpool UK, we will hold a Workshop on Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules. This workshop is a follow on from successful workshops at Jurix 2007 and ICAIL 2009.

Legal cases and legal rules in common law contexts have been modelled in a variety of ways over the course of research in AI and Law to support different styles of reasoning for a variety of problem-solving contexts, such as decision-making, information retrieval, teaching, etc. Particular legal topic areas and cases have received wide coverage in the AI and Law literature including wild animals (e.g. Pierson v. Post, Young v. Hitchens, and Keeble v. Hickeringill), intellectual property (e.g. Mason v. Jack Daniel Distillery), and evidence (e.g. the Rijkbloem case). As well, some legal rules have been widely discussed, such as legal argument schemes (e.g. Expert Testimony) or rules of evidence (see Walton 2002). However, other areas have been less well covered. For example, there appears to be less research on modelling legal cases in civil law contexts; investigation of taxonomies and ontologies of legal rules would support abstraction and formalisation (see Sherwin 2009); additional legal rules could be brought under the scope of investigation, such as those bearing on criminal assault or causes of action.

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum in which researchers can present their research on modelling legal cases and legal rules.

Papers are solicited that model a particular legal case or a small set of legal rules. Authors are free to choose the case or set of legal rules and analyse them according to the authors’ preferred model of representation; any theoretical discussion should be grounded in or exemplified by the case or rules at hand. Papers should make clear what are the particular distinctive features of their approach and why these features are useful in modelling the chosen case or rules. The workshop is an opportunity for authors to demonstrate the benefits of their approach and for group discussions to identify useful overlapping features as well as aspects to be further explored and developed.

All submissions should be emailed as a PDF attachment to the workshop organiser, Adam Wyner, at: adam@wyner.info.

See the workshop website for more information.

Programme Committee (Preliminary)

• Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
• Floris Bex, University of Dundee, UK
• Trevor Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK
• Tom Gordon, Fraunhofer, FOKUS, Germany
• Robert Richards, Seattle, Washington, USA
• Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Italy
• Burkhard Schafer, Edinburgh Law School, Scotland
• Douglas Walton, University of Windsor, Canada

Dates
Paper submission: Friday, November 5, 2010
Accepted Notification: Friday, November 12, 2010
Workshop Registration: Friday, November 19, 2010
December 15th, 2010 Jurix Workshops/Tutorials
December 16th-17th, 2010 Jurix 2010 Main Conference

By Adam Wyner
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