A cognitive approach to judicial opinion structure: applying domain expertise to component analysis

ABSTRACT

Empirical research on basic components of American judicial opinions has only scratched the surface. Lack of a coordinated pool of legal experts or adequate computational resources are but two reasons responsible for this deficiency. We have undertaken a study to uncover fundamental components of judicial opinions found in American case law. The study was aided by a team of twelve expert attorney-editors with a combined total of 135 years of legal editing experience. The scientific hypothesis underlying the experiment was that after years of working closely with thousands of judicial opinions, expert attorneys would develop a refined and internalized schema of the content and structure of legal cases. In this study participants were permitted to describe both concept-related and format-related components. The resultant components, representing a combination of these two broad categories, are reported on in this paper. Additional experiments are currently under way which further validated and refine this set of components and apply them to new search paradigms.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.0 General
          Subjects: Cognitive simulation

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
case law analysis, cognitive models, document structure