Modular argumentation for modelling legal doctrines of performance relief

ABSTRACT

Legal doctrines provide principles, guidelines and rules for dispute resolution in reasoning with cases. To apply legal doctrines, the context of a contract consisting of different knowledge bases about beliefs and expertise of contract parties as well as about common social, legal domains need to be established. Judges then decide legal outcomes by reasoning from factors drawn in contract contexts following legal doctrines. In this paper, we model this decision making by modular argumentation. We focus on legal doctrines in contract law, especially the doctrines of impossibility and frustration of purpose.

REFERENCES

• 1: Katie Atkinson , Trevor Bench-Capon, Legal case-based reasoning as practical reasoning, Artificial Intelligence and Law, v.13 n.1, p.93-131, March 2005 [doi>10.1007/s10506-006-9003-3]
• 2: T. J. M. Bench-Capon. Agreeing to differ: modelling persuasive dialogue between parties with different values. Informal Logic, 22: 2002, 2003.
• 3: Trevor Bench-Capon , Katie Atkinson , Alison Chorley, Persuasion and Value in Legal Argument, Journal of Logic and Computation, v.15 n.6, p.1075-1097, December 2005 [doi>10.1093/logcom/exi058]
• 4: Trevor Bench-Capon , Giovanni Sartor, A model of legal reasoning with cases incorporating theories and values, Artificial Intelligence, v.150 n.1-2, p.97-143, November 2003 [doi>10.1016/S0004-3702(03)00108-5]
• 5: P. M. Dung. Logic programming as dialog-game. Technical report, AIT, 1993.
• 6: Phan Minh Dung, On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games, Artificial Intelligence, v.77 n.2, p.321-357, Sept. 1995 [doi>10.1016/0004-3702(94)00041-X]
• 7: P. M. Dung , R. A. Kowalski , F. Toni, Dialectic proof procedures for assumption-based, admissible argumentation, Artificial Intelligence, v.170 n.2, p.114-159, February 2006 [doi>10.1016/j.artint.2005.07.002]
• 8: Phan Minh Dung , Phan Minh Thang, Modular Argumentation For Modelling Legal Doctrines in Common Law of Contract, Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2008: The Twenty-First Annual Conference, p.108-117, July 08, 2008
• 9: P. M. Dung and P. M. Thang. Towards an Argument-based Model of Legal Doctrines in Common Law of Contracts. In 9th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems (CLIMA), Sept. 2008.
• 10: E. A. Farnsworth, W. F. Young, and C. Sanger. Contracts: Cases and Materials. Foundation Pr; 6 edition, June 2001.
• 11: A. D. H. Farrell, M. J. Sergot, M. Sallé, and C. Bartolini. Using the event calculus for tracking the normative state of contracts. Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst, 14(2--3): 99--129, 2005.
• 12: Anne von der Lieth Gardner, An artificial intelligence approach to legal reasoning, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987
• 13: Thomas F. Gordon, The Pleadings Game: an exercise in computational dialectics, Artificial Intelligence and Law, v.2 n.4, p.239-292, 1993/1994 [doi>10.1007/BF00871972]
• 14: Thomas F. Gordon , Henry Prakken , Douglas Walton, The Carneades model of argument and burden of proof, Artificial Intelligence, v.171 n.10-15, p.875-896, July, 2007 [doi>10.1016/j.artint.2007.04.010]
• 15: G. Governatori and Z. Milosevic. A formal analysis of a business contract language. Jan. 01 2006.
• 16: Guenter Freitel. Frustration and Force Majeure. Sweet and Maxell, 2004.
• 17: L. Thorne McCarty, An implementation of Eisner v. Macomber, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.276-286, May 21-24, 1995, College Park, Maryland, United States [doi>10.1145/222092.222258]
• 18: R. A. Posner. Economic Analysis of Law. Wolters Kluwer, Feb. 2007.
• 19: H. Prakken. Formal systems for persuasion dialogue. 2006.
• 20: H. Prakken and G. Sartor. A dialectical model of assessing conflicting arguments in legal reasoning. Artif. Intell. Law, 4(3--4): 331--368, 1996.
• 21: J. B. Steven and A. E. Melvin. Contract Law: Selected Source Materials. Foundation Press, 20 July 2007.
• 22: Hajime Yoshino, The systematization of legal meta-inference, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.266-275, May 21-24, 1995, College Park, Maryland, United States [doi>10.1145/222092.222257]
• 23: H. Yoshino. Logical structure of contract law system - for constructing a knowledge base of the united nations convention on contracts for the international sale of goods -. JACIII, 2(1): 2--11, 1998.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.1 Applications and Expert Systems
          Subjects: Law

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.3 Deduction and Theorem Proving

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.5 LEGAL ASPECTS OF COMPUTING
      K.5.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Legal Aspects, Theory

Keywords:
argumentation, frustration, impossibility, legal doctrines