Argumentation structures in legal dossiers

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the best chance of utilising AI & Law models of legal argument in practice in the near future may be in desiging legal argumentation management systems. Such systems do not have a knowledge base and inference engine but allow the user to structure a legal case dossier in terms of the argumentation structure of a case, so that better overview over the dossier is obtained and documents can be better retrieved, compared and drafted. To obtain insight in how such systems should be designed, a case study is presented in which a dossier of a solicitor representing a client in a Dutch civil dispute is analysed according to its argumentation structure. The resulting structures are visualised using the Araucaria software tool. Special attention is paid to the creation of the argumentation structure over time in the course of the dispute, and to the argumentative tactics and strategies employed by the solicitor.

REFERENCES

• 1: Kevin D. Ashley, Modeling Legal Arguments: Reasoning with Cases and Hypotheticals, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991
• 2: J. Breuker, A. Valente, and R. Winkels. Legal ontologies in knowledge engineering and information management. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 12:241--277, 2004. Appeared in 2006.
• 3: Jack G. Conrad , Daniel P. Da bney, A cognitive approach to judicial opinion structure: applying domain expertise to component analysis, Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.1-11, May 2001, St. Louis, Missouri, United States [doi>10.1145/383535.383536]
• 4: J. C. Hage, Reasoning with Rules. An Essay on Legal Reasoning and its Underlying Logic, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 1997.
• 5: M. Henket. On the logical analysis of judicial decisions. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 5(2):153--164, June 1992.
• 6: Marc Lauritsen, Intelligent tools for managing factual arguments, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, June 06-11, 2005, Bologna, Italy [doi>10.1145/1165485.1165501]
• 7: J. Plug. Indicators of obiter dicta. A pragma-dialectical analysis of textual clues for the reconstruction of legal argumentation. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 8:189--203, 2000.
• 8: H. Prakken. Incomplete arguments in legal discourse: a case study. In T. Bench-Capon, A. Daskalopulu, and R. Winkels, editors, Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, JURIX 2002: The Fifteenth Annual Conference, 93--102. IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2002.
• 9: H. Prakken. AI & Law, Logic and Argument Schemes. Argumentation, 19:303--320, 2005. Special issue on 'the Toulmin model today'.
• 10: H. Prakken. Argumentatiemanagement voor Juristen. (Argumentation management for lawyers. In Dutch) Inaugural Address Faculty of Law, University of Groningen, 2005.
• 11: C. A. Reed and G. W. A. Rowe. Araucaria: Software for argument analysis, diagramming and representation. International Journal of AI Tools, 13:961--980, 2004.
• 12: Edwina L. Rissland , Kevin D. Ashley , R. P. Loui, AI and law: a fruitful synergy, Artificial Intelligence, v.150 n.1-2, p.1-15, November 2003 [doi>10.1016/S0004-3702(03)00122-X]
• 13: P. Thagard and C. Shelley. Abductive reasoning: Logic, visual thinking, and coherence. In M.-L. D. C. et al., editor, Logic and scientific methods, pages 413427. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997.
• 14: B. Verheij. Virtual Arguments. On the Design of Argument Assistants for Lawyers and Other Arguers. T. M. C. Asser Press, The Hague, 2005.
• 15: D. Walton. Argumentation Schemes for Presumptive Reasoning. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, 1996.