Legal interpretation in expert systems

Based on the interpretation on the evolution of theoretical basis of the construction of legal expert system as the clue, this article mainly analyzes and points out the dilemma faced by symbolism and connectionism as the algorithm on construction of legal expert system. Through defeasible reasoning, a contextual-based legal expert system could be realized. The legal expert system should be constructed with the judge as the center character, in which the personality of the judge could not necessarily be eliminated. As a result, the article provides a model of a legal expert system based on dual processing, including factual argumentation and legal argumentation.

Socio-legal scholars have long recognised the importance of understanding the difference and the interaction between the ‘law in the books’ — the formal legal rules and doctrines made by parliaments and the courts, and the ‘law in action’ — the processes and practices by which those rules and doctrines are put into effect. Similarly, public lawyers and regulatory theorists have highlighted the importance of understanding the role of regulatory discretion in the enforcement of rules. The commonly understood message in these overlapping areas of research is that we cannot properly understand the law if we limit our attention to formal rules. A related point is that there is nothing necessarily improper about the exercise of regulatory discretion. Nor is there anything necessarily improper about the fact that the processes of rule enforcement can produce different outcomes than might be suggested by a simple reading of the rule itself.

Informatics for the Law: LEXIS—A legal expert system on Italian family law

Reviewed by: The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing by Jens Temmen Katrina Phillips (bio) The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing Jens Temmen Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020, x +259 pp. ISBN 9783825347130, $56 hardcover. Settlers in what is now known as the United States dreamed of expansion before they even reached the westernmost part of the continent. According to Roberta Conner, Joseph J. Ellis identified a "fully continental vision of an American empire" in George Washington's 1783 annual message—and James P. Ronda contends that Thomas Jefferson was "determined to make the United States an imperial contender" (qtd. in Conner 108). It would not be as easy as these men hoped, though, particularly as American settlers, surveyors, and soldiers continually encountered hundreds of sovereign Native nations who had called these lands homes since time immemorial. America's burgeoning legal system—and its stumbling implementation of often contradictory federal Indian policies—regularly required what Jens Temmen considers "the terminology of aberration, exception, or simply extinction" in order to marginalize Native nations within US legal discourses (39). The federal government, along with American citizens, businessmen, and military officials, turned their attentions overseas toward the end of the nineteenth century, gleefully embracing the spoils of imperialism. For Temmen, though, this shift is not as neatly defined or differentiated as some scholars may hope (39). In The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s), Temmen traces the trajectory of US imperial expansion from the continent to overseas, focusing on what he considers "the moments and spaces that connect or disconnect these phases" (2). For Temmen, the US nation-state became conterminous with the North American continent as early as the American Revolution, projecting sovereignty over the continent while simultaneously nullifying Native and Indigenous sovereignties (3). Temmen argues that the study of US imperialism seems to be in a holding pattern, one that maintains an ongoing dialogue over how to analyze the differences in the two phases of American expansion without simply reverting to what Amy Kaplan calls "the central geographic bifurcation between continental expansion [End Page 104] and overseas empire" (10). The book is rooted in what he describes as "nodes of connection and narratives of disconnection between these U.S. imperialism(s)," centering 1898 as an alleged watershed moment for US imperialism (8). Temmen's addition of the plural "s" in parentheses is deliberate, underscoring his focus on this "multitude of imperial strategies, while still emphasizing their fundamental connectedness" (11–12). The notion of "the trinity of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territory" serves as what Temmen calls "the core vocabulary" of the book (3). By analyzing works that were either written or cowritten by Indigenous authors alongside US legal texts, Temmen highlights the myriad ways Indigenous people have long pushed back against the notions of US imperialism. At first glance, Temmen's choice of works may seem incongruous or too dissimilar or disparate to support his argument: Temmen places John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) and Queen Lili'uokalani's Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (1898) alongside Geronimo and Stephen M. Barrett's Geronimo's Story of His Life (1905). One might argue that there are few similarities among the histories of these three Indigenous nations—the Cherokee, the Kānaka Maoli, and the Apache—not to mention the differences among their engagements with and methods of resistance to American imperialism. However, Temmen's careful reading of these literary texts against legal and government-written texts balances out what he calls the consideration of the two, particularly by legal scholars, as "unequal partners" divided between robust enforcement and emotional education (45). The Indigenous authors of these texts wanted justice for their communities, and they deliberately put the US legal system on trial through their writings (48). These texts, for Temmen, become a means of "haunting" the system that has long sought to erase and eradicate Indigenous sovereignty. Temmen begins with Ridge's dime novel...

In this paper we gauge the utility of general-purpose, open-domain semantic parsing for textual entailment recognition by combining graph-structured meaning representations with semantic technologies and formal reasoning tools. Our approach achieves high precision, and in two case studies we show that when reasoning over n-best analyses from the parser the performance of our system reaches stateof-the-art for rule-based textual entailment systems. 1 Background and Motivation There is a growing interest in recent years in general-purpose semantic parsing into graphbased meaning representations, which provide greater expressive power than tree-based structures. Recent efforts in this spirit include, for example, Abstract Meaning Representation (Banarescu et al., 2013), and Semantic Dependency Parsing (SDP) (Oepen et al., 2014; Oepen et al., 2015). Simultaneously, in the Semantic Web community, a range of generic semantic technologies for storing and processing graph-structured data has been made available, but these have not been much used for natural language processing tasks. We propose a flexible, generic framework for precision-oriented Textual Entailment (TE) recognition that combines semantic parsing, graph-based representations of sentence meaning, and semantic technologies. During the decade since the TE task was defined, (logical) inference-based approaches have made some important contributions to the field. Systems such as Bos and Markert (2006) and Tatu and Moldovan (2006) employ automated proof search over logical representations of the input sentences. Other systems, such as Bar-Haim et al. (2007), apply transformational rules to linguistic representations of the sentence pairs, and determine entailment through graph subsumption. Because inference-based systems are vulnerable to incomplete knowledge in the rule set and errors in the mapping from natural language sentences to logical forms or linguistics representations, and because the definition of the TE task encourages a more relaxed, non-logical notion of entailment, the majority of TE systems have used more robust approaches, however. Our work supports a notion of logical inference for TE by reasoning with formal rules over graph-structured meaning representations, while achieving results that are comparable with robust approaches. We use a freely available, grammar-driven semantic parser and a well-defined reduction of underspecified logical-form meaning representations into variable-free semantic graphs called Elementary Dependency Structures (EDS) (Oepen and Lonning, 2006). We capitalize on a pre-existing storage and search infrastructure for EDSs using generic semantic technologies. For entailment classification, we create inference rules that enrich the EDS graphs, apply the rules with a generic reasoner, and use graph alignment as a decision tool. To test our generic setup, we perform two case studies where we replicate well-performing TE systems, one from the Parser Evaluation using Textual Entailments (PETE) task (Yuret et al., 2010), and one from SemEval 2014 Task 1 (Marelli et al., 2014). The best published results for the PETE task, Lien (2014), were obtained through heuristic rules that align meaning representations based on structural similarity. Lien and Kouylekov (2014) extend the same basic approach for SemEval 2014 by including lexical relations and negation handling. We recast the handwritten heuristic rules from these systems as formal Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules, and run them with a generic reasoning tool over EDS

Knowledge Engineering for Industrial Expert Systems

This paper presents a critical analysis of a legal expert system architecture, focusing the knowledge representation that represents the most important step in the construction of a modern legal information system. After a long period of experience, we can speak of global systems, because the formalized system knowledge is only a part of system data that may be improved to the user also from a periferic data bases. The new legal systems are tools that can offer information for decision aid and user consulting from different modules and also they offer a sophisticated information retrieval founded, for instance, upon hypertext models or thesauri.

Justice and the Ethics of Legal Interpretation addresses how it is that legal texts -laws, statutes and regulations – can, and do have meaning. Conventionally, legal decisions are justified with reference to language. But since language is always open to interpretation, and so cannot fully justify any legal decision, there is a responsibility that is inherent in legal interpretation itself. In this book, Susanna Lindroos-Hovinheimo uncovers and analyses this responsibility – which, she argues, is not limited by the text that is being interpreted (and through its mediation, by the legal system). It is not simply a responsibility to read well; it implies a responsibility for the effects of the interpretation in a particular situation and with regard to those whose case is being decided. Ultimately, it is a responsibility to do justice. It is these two aspects of responsibility that are conceptualised here as the two key dimensions of the ethics of legal interpretation: the textual and the situational. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Derrida and Levinas, Justice and the Ethics of Legal Interpretation offers a fresh approach to long-standing questions about language and meaning in law. It will be of enormous value to those with interests in jurisprudence and legal theory.

Legal discovery is essentially a legal enforcement effort by judges to realize the legal objectives of legal certainty, justice, and legal utility. When formal legal rules are absent or unclear, judges use philosophical reasoning to fill the gap, for example through interpretation, analogy, or refinement of the law, rather than simply literal application. Legal philosophy studies the nature of law, justice, and the values underlying the legal system, which then serve as guidelines for judges in the legal discovery process. Thus, legal philosophy and legal discovery in judicial decisions are closely related. Forms of legal discovery in a court decision that judges in Indonesia can take include legal interpretation, legal construction, or reasoning.

This paper deals with discourse analysis, with specific reference to the Linguistic and Logic Based Legal Expert System, LEX. In the LEX project we concentrated on a few arbitrarily selected court decisions, extracted the case descriptions, and then added the necessary background knowledge to our prototype expert system to analyze the case descriptions and to deduce the answers to some juridical questions. In this paper we present and comment on a typical discourse representation structure for an accident description in the corpus we studied.

The arrangement of self-governance institutions is the main obstacle to achieving sustainability for ecosystems and local livelihoods. The aim of this study was to describe the institutional sustainability of Community Conservation Agreement (CCA) in Lore Lindu National Park (LLNP), located in Central Sulawesi Province, Indonesia. This study applied a descriptive method by identifying and analyzing the relationship between characteristics of the community and nearby resources, as well as the regulations and rules (formal and local rules arranged in CCA), behavior and performance of institutional CCA, and the interests and power of stakeholders. The research demonstrates that high institutional sustainability of CCA is not only determined by the relations among the community, but that it is also motivated by the common interests to preserve water in the LLNP area as a means for avoiding disaster. However, principles of collective-choice arrangements, minimal recognition of rights to organize, and nested enterprises in CCA were not running well. Strategies to improve the institutional sustainability of CCA include unifying landscape zones that describe property rights of local communities within a conservation area that is recognized by all stakeholders and should be supported by formal legal rules.

The article deals with the philosophical and legal foundations of legal interpretation technique. In particular it is pointed out that in spite of the fact that the legal interpretation is an integral procedure realized within the framework of law implementation (especially - law enforcement), at the same time it has its own meaning and due to this fact deserves a separate scientific attention. Legal interpretation is aimed not simply at clarification of the meaning of normative or other prescriptions, but at finding out the actual will of the legislator. It is pointed out that, contrary to the “classical” postulates of legal interpretation, the source material for interpretation is not only the texts of normative legal acts. It is clear that in the countries of the Anglo-Saxon legal family interpretation is aimed at clarification of general principles, legal trends, which are reflected in the judicial precedents on similar cases. However, in the countries of the Romano-Germanic legal family there is also a significant shift of reference points towards the analysis not only of the normative text, but also of judicial practice.

Legal reasoning involves case analysis in statutory as well as real world perspectives. The impact of real world perspective on case analysis poses a serious challenge to knowledge engineers for building legal expert systems. A legal expert system intends to provide intelligent support to legal professionals. The proposed legal predictive system is an attempt to predict the most probable outcome of a case according to statutory as well as real world knowledge of the legal domain. The system accepts the current fact situation of a case and analyses it interactively with legal personnel. This work introduces a frame-like knowledge structure,lattice, with two-dimensional attributes. This paper contains a detailed discussion on artificial intelligence-based case analysis of theft cases in a real world perspective.

Great Trials and the Law in the Historical Imagination: A Law and Humanities Approach introduces readers to the history of law and issues in historical, legal, and artistic interpretation by examining six well-known historical trials through works of art that portray them. Great Trials provides readers with an accessible, non-dogmatic introduction to the interdisciplinary ‘law and humanities’ approach to law, legal history, and legal interpretation. By examining how six famous/notorious trials in Western history have been portrayed in six major works of art, the book shows how issues of legal, historical, and artistic interpretation can become intertwined: the different ways we embed law in narrative, how we bring conscious and subconscious conceptions of history to our interpretation of law, and how aesthetic predilections and moral commitments to the law may influence our views of history. The book studies well-known depictions of the trials of Socrates, Cicero, Jesus, Thomas More, the Salem ‘witches’, and John Scopes and provides innovative analyses of those works. The epilogue examines how historical methodology and historical imagination are crucial to both our understanding of the law and our aesthetic choices through various readings of Harper Lee’s beloved character, Atticus Finch. The first book to employ a ‘law and humanities’ approach to delve into the institution of the trial, and what it means in different legal systems at different historical times, this book will appeal to academics, students and others with interests in legal history, law and popular culture and law and the humanities.

This paper addresses the judicial activism of the European Court of Justice. It highlights that the ECJ’s jurisprudence has been more concerned with system-building and formal legal rules than with material aspects, consequently qualifying the corresponding activism as a weak activism. The paper also analyzes its causes, concluding that the activism of the ECJ, in parallel with the activism of other international courts, is fostered by the inexistence of a proper system of separation of powers, the vagueness of the Treaties and the limited control over its activity. It concludes by enumerating the possible drawbacks of the ECJ’s activism, in particular with regard to the legitimacy of the European integration process.