Ashley,K. D.-But, see, accord: generating blue book citations in HYPO

ABSTRACT

An interesting and important aspect of legal reasoning is the use of citations to precedent cases as justifications for legal conclusions. In this paper, we describe the standard use of citations as described in the attorney's “Blue Book” and how HYPO, a program that models case-based legal reasoning, generates and uses citations in a very similar way to analyze fact situations and to communicate with an attorney/user. More specifically, we describe how, given a fact situation (“cfs”), HYPO dynamically generates the citations to cases in its Case Knowledge Base (“CKB”) by (1) analyzing the factual features of the cfs to see what dimensions apply, (2) retrieving and constructing a “neighborhood” of citable cases around the cfs (the “Claim Lattice”) and (3) constructing the “Cites Display”, a network of citations to the most on point cases (“mopc”) that is a skeletal frame for a legal argument about the cfs.

REFERENCES

• 1: Kevin D. Ashley, Modelling legal argument: reasoning with cases and hypotheticals, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 1988
• 2: Kevin D. Ashley and Edwina L. Rissland. Creating Neigh. borhoods of Cases, Projections Through a Case Space. Project Memo 17, The COUNSELOR Project, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, 1987.
• 3: Kevin D. Ashley and Edwina L. Rissland. Toward Modelling Legal Argument. In Antonio A. Martino and F. Socci Natali, editors, A~tomated Analysis of Legal Texts, Logic, Informatics, Law, pages 19- 30, Elsevier (North-Holland), 1986.
• 4: Harold J. Berman and William R. Greiner. The Nature 4nd Functions of Law. The Foundation Press, Mineola, NY, 1980.
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• 8: Edwina L. Rissland and Kevin D. Ashley. H YPO: A Case- Based Reasoning System. Project Memo 18, The COUN- SELOR Project, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, 1987.
• 9: Edwina L. Rissland and Kevin D. Ashley. Hypotheticals as Heuristic Device. In Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on Artificial intelligence, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, August 1986. Philadelphia, PA.
• 10: Edwina L. Rissland, E. M. Valcarce, and Kevin D. Ashley. Explaining and Arguing with Examples. In Proceedings of the Fourth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Austin, TX, August 1984.
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INDEX TERMS

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

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human information processing

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.3 Deduction and Theorem Proving
          Subjects: Deduction (e.g., natural, rule-based)

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Theory