Jump to content

Applications of artificial intelligence to legal informatics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Fjbex (talk | contribs) at 20:27, 7 October 2014. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Artificial Intelligence and Law (AI and Law) is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI) mainly concerned with applications of AI to legal informatics problems and original research on those problems. It is also concerned to contribute in the other direction: to export tools and techniques developed in the context of legal problems to AI in general. For example, theories of legal decision making, especially models of argumentation, have contributed to knowledge representation and reasoning, models of social organization based on norms have contributed to multi-agent systems, reasoning with legal cases has contributed to case-based reasoning and the need to store and retrieve large amounts of textual data has resulted in contributions to conceptual information retrieval and intelligent databases.

The roots of AI and Law can be found in a number of pieces of individual research, but during the 1980s an identifiable community began to form and in 1987 a biennial conference, the International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL), was instituted[1]. This led to the foundation of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), to organize and convene subsequent ICAILs, and this in turn led to the foundation of the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal, first published in 1992[2]. In Europe, the annual JURIX conferences (organised by the Jurix Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems), began in 1988. Initially intended to bring together the Dutch-speaking (i.e. Dutch and Flemish) researchers, JURIX quickly developed into an international, primarily European, conference and since 2002 has regularly been held outside the Dutch speaking countries[3].

History

Although Loevinger[4], Allen[5] and Mehl[6] anticipated several of the ideas that would become important in AI and Law, the first serious proposal for applying AI techniques to law is usually taken to be Buchanan and Headrick[7]. Early work from this period includes Thorne McCarty’s influential TAXMAN project[8] in the USA and Ronald Stamper’s LEGOL project[9] in the UK. The former concerned the modeling of the majority and minority arguments in a US Tax law case (Eisner v Macomber), while the latter attempted to provide a formal model of the rules and regulations that govern an organization. Both of these topics remain important in AI and Law today.

Landmarks in the early 1980s include Carole Hafner’s work on conceptual retrieval[10], Anne Gardner’s work on contract law[11], Rissland’s work on legal hypotheticals[12] and the work at Imperial College, London on executable formalisations of legislation[13].

See also

References

  1. ^ List of past ICAIL conferences
  2. ^ List of AI and Law journal volumes
  3. ^ List of Jurix conferences
  4. ^ Loevinger, Lee. Jurimetrics--The Next Step Forward. Minn. L. Rev. 33 (1948): 455.
  5. ^ Allen, Layman E. Symbolic logic: A razor-edged tool for drafting and interpreting legal documents. Yale LJ 66 (1956): 833.
  6. ^ Mehl, L.Automation in the Legal World: From the Machine Processing of Legal Information to the" Law Machine,. Mechanisation of Thought Processes (1958): 757-787.
  7. ^ Buchanan, Bruce G., and Headrick, Thomas E. Some speculation about artificial intelligence and legal reasoning. Stanford Law Review (1970): 40-62.
  8. ^ McCarty, L. Thorne. Reflections on" Taxman: An Experiment in Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning. Harvard Law Review (1977): 837-893.
  9. ^ Stamper, Ronald K. The LEGOL 1 prototype system and language. The Computer Journal 20.2 (1977): 102-108.
  10. ^ Hafner, Carole D., (1981). Representing knowledge in an information retrieval system. in Oddy, R et al. (editors) (1981). Information Retrieval Research. London: Butterworths.
  11. ^ Gardner, Anne The design of a legal analysis program. AAAI-83. 1983.
  12. ^ Rissland, Edwina L. Examples in Legal Reasoning: Legal Hypotheticals. IJCAI. 1983.
  13. ^ e.g. Sergot, Marek J., et al. The British Nationality Act as a logic program. Communications of the ACM 29.5 (1986): 370-386.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Applications_of_artificial_intelligence_to_legal_informatics&oldid=628699937"