The standard model of precedential constraint holds that a court is equally free to modify a precedent of its own and a precedent of a superior court—overruling aside, it does not differentiate horizontal and vertical precedents. This paper shows that no model can capture the U.S. doctrine of precedent without making that distinction. A precise model is then developed that does just that. This requires situating precedent cases in a formal representation of a hierarchical legal structure, and adjusting the constraint (...) that a precedent imposes based on the relationship of the precedent court and the instant court. The paper closes with suggestions for further improvements of the model. (shrink)

Computational models of legal precedent-based reasoning developed in AI and Law are typically based on the simplifying assumption that the background set of precedent cases is consistent. Besides being unrealistic in the legal domain, this assumption is problematic for recent promising applications of these models to the development of explainable AI methods. In this paper I explore a model of legal precedent-based reasoning that, unlike existing models, does not rely on the assumption that the background set of precedent cases is (...) consistent. The model is a generalization of the reason model of precedential constraint. I first show that the model supports an interesting deontic logic, where consistent obligations can be derived from inconsistent case bases. I then provide an explanation of this surprising result by proposing a reformulation of the model in terms of cases that support a new potential decision and cases that conflict with it. Finally, I show that the reformulation of the model allows us to verify that inconsistent case bases do not make verification that a decision is permissible substantially more complex than consistent case bases and to introduce intuitive criteria to compare different permissible decisions. (shrink)

The article considers two different interpretations of the reason model of precedent pioneered by John Horty. On a plausible interpretation of the reason model, past cases provide reasons to prioritize reasons favouring the same outcome as a past case over reasons favouring the opposing outcome. Here I consider the merits of this approach to the role of precedent in legal reasoning in comparison with a closely related view favoured by some legal theorists, according to which past cases provide reasons for (...) undercutting (or ‘excluding’) reasons favouring the opposing outcome. After embedding both accounts within a general default logic, I note some important differences between the two approaches that emerge as a result of plausible distinctions between rebutting and undercutting defeat in formal models of legal reasoning. These differences stem from the ‘preference independence’ of undercutting defeat. Undercutting reasons succeed in defeating opposing reasons irrespective of their relative strength. As a result, the two accounts differ in their account of the way in which precedents constrain judicial reasoning. I conclude by suggesting that the two approaches can be integrated within a single model, in which the distinction between undercutting and rebutting defeat is used to account for the distinction between strict and persuasive forms of precedential constraint. (shrink)

The first issue of _Artificial Intelligence and Law_ journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on landmark papers from the first decade of that journal. The topics discussed include reasoning with cases, argumentation, normative reasoning, dialogue, representing legal knowledge and neural networks.

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper offers some commentaries on papers drawn from the Journal’s third decade. They indicate a major shift within Artificial Intelligence, both generally and in AI and Law: away from symbolic techniques to those based on Machine Learning approaches, especially those based on Natural Language texts rather than feature sets. Eight papers are discussed: two concern the management and use of documents available on the World Wide Web, (...) and six apply machine learning techniques to a variety of legal applications. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the cases, comparing different ways of representing cases, and formalising precedential reasoning. One introduces a method of analysing arguments that was to become very widely used in AI and Law, namely (...) argumentation schemes. Two relate to ontologies for the representation of legal concepts and two take advantage of the increasing availability of legal corpora in this decade, to automate document summarisation and for the mining of arguments. (shrink)

This paper investigates the process of reasoning through which a judge determines whether a precedent-case gives her a binding reason to follow in her present-case. I review the objections that have been raised against the two main accounts of reasoning by precedent: the rule-account and the analogy-account. I argue that both accounts can be made viable by amending them to meet the objections. Nonetheless, I believe that there is an argument for preferring accounts that integrate analogical reasoning: any account of (...) reasoning by precedent that is descriptively minimally adequate will leave some room for judicial discretion. Discretion should be used under consideration of the best legally relevant arguments for and against a decision. Integrating analogical reasoning helps the judge to bring to her own attention the strongest case for following. Analogical reasoning also eases the recognition of possible reasons for distinguishing. Thereby, it facilitates a more balanced decision-making process. (shrink)

The third of Berman and Hafner’s early nineties papers on reasoning with legal cases concerned temporal context, in particular the evolution of case law doctrine over time in response to new cases and against a changing background of social values and purposes. In this paper we consider the ways in which changes in case law doctrine can be accommodated in a recently proposed methodology for encapsulating case law theories, and relate these changes the sources of change identified by Berman and (...) Hafner. (shrink)

In previous work, I showed how the “reason model” of precedential constraint could naturally be generalized from the standard setting in which it was first developed to a richer setting in which dimensional information is represented as well. Surprisingly, it then turned out that, in this new dimensional setting, the reason model of constraint collapsed into the “result model,” which supports only a fortiori reasoning. The purpose of this note is to suggest a modification of the reason model of constraint (...) that distinguishes it from the result model even in the dimensional setting. (shrink)

In the course of legal reasoning—whether for purposes of deciding an issue, justifying a decision, predicting how an issue will be decided, or arguing for how it should be decided—one often is required to reach conclusions based on a balance of reasons that is not straightforwardly reducible to the application of rules. Recent AI and Law work has modeled reason-balancing, both within and across cases, with set-theoretic and rule- or value-ordering approaches. This article explores a way to model balancing in (...) quantitative terms that may yield new questions, insights, and tools. (shrink)

This article discusses the desirability and feasibility of modeling precedents with multiple interpretations within factor-based models of precedential constraint. The main idea is that allowing multiple reasonable interpretations of cases and modeling precedential constraint as a function of what all reasonable interpretations compel may be advantageous. The article explains the potential benefits of extending the models in this way with a focus on incorporating a theory of vertical precedent in U.S. federal appellate courts. It also considers the costs of extending (...) the models in this way, such as the significant increase in the functional size of the case base and the need to provide some kind of ordering on interpretations to select a “best” interpretation. Finally, the article suggests partially incorporating multiple interpretations of dimensions as a realistic starting point for incorporating interpretations generally, and shows how doing so can help address difficulties with dimensions. The conclusion remarks on the use of interpretations to deal with inconsistent precedents. (shrink)

This paper presents a methodology to design and implement programs intended to decide cases, described as sets of factors, according to a theory of a particular domain based on a set of precedent cases relating to that domain. We useDialectical Frameworks, a recent development in AI knowledge representation, as the central feature of our design method. ADFs will play a role akin to that played by Entity–Relationship models in the design of database systems. First, we explain how the factor hierarchy (...) of the well-known legal reasoning system CATO can be used to instantiate an ADF for the domain of US Trade Secrets. This is intended to demonstrate the suitability of ADFs for expressing the design of legal cased based systems. The method is then applied to two other legal domains often used in the literature of AI and Law. In each domain, the design is provided by the domain analyst expressing the cases in terms of factors organised into an ADF from which an executable program can be implemented in a straightforward way by taking advantage of the closeness of the acceptance conditions of the ADF to components of an executable program. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the performance and efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the program and the transparency of the reasoning. This evaluation suggests ways in which factor based systems, which are limited by taking as their starting point the representation of cases as sets of factors and so abstracting away the particular facts, can be extended to address open issues in AI and Law by incorporating the case facts to improve the decision, and by considering justification and reasoning using portion of precedents. (shrink)

This paper attempts to formalize the differences between two methods of analysis used by judicial opinions in common law jurisdictions to contradict holdings posited by earlier opinions: “disagreeing” with the holdings of the earlier opinions and “attributing” holdings to the prior opinions. The paper will demonstrate that it is necessary to model both methods of analysis differently to generate an accurate picture of the state of legal authority in hypothetical examples, as well as in an example based on Barry Friedman’s (...) analysis of the “stealth overruling” of Miranda v. Arizona through subsequent judicial interpretations. Because the question of whether “disagreement” and “attribution” need to be modeled separately relates to contradictions rather than to subtler interactions between holdings such as “distinguishing,” it can be answered using the simple technique of modeling holdings as propositional variables and evaluating the holdings using truth tables. (shrink)

The volume analyses and develops David Makinson’s efforts to make classical logic useful outside its most obvious application areas. The book contains chapters that analyse, appraise, or reshape Makinson’s work and chapters that develop themes emerging from his contributions. These are grouped into major areas to which Makinsons has made highly influential contributions and the volume in its entirety is divided into four sections, each devoted to a particular area of logic: belief change, uncertain reasoning, normative systems and the resources (...) of classical logic. Among the contributions included in the volume, one chapter focuses on the “inferential preferential method”, i.e. the combined use of classical logic and mechanisms of preference and choice and provides examples from Makinson’s work in non-monotonic and defeasible reasoning and belief revision. One chapter offers a short autobiography by Makinson which details his discovery of modern logic, his travels across continents and reveals his intellectual encounters and inspirations. The chapter also contains an unusually explicit statement on his views on the role of logic in philosophy. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of dimensions in the reason model found in Horty : 1–33, 2011), Horty and Bench-Capon and Rigoni :133–160, 2015. doi: 10.1007/s10506-015-9166-x). The account is constructed with the purpose of rectifying problems with the approach to incorporating dimensions in Horty, namely, the problems arising from the collapse of the distinction between the reason model and the result model on that approach. Examination of the newly constructed theory revealed that the importance of dimensions in the reason model (...) lies in their ability to establish weighings between reasons/factors of the same polarity. This permits past cases to constrain future cases in ways they could not on the reason model with just factors. The paper then discusses how dimensions might be established from a case base and how dimensions that are incomplete in various aspects might be dealt with in the theory. It closes with comparisons to other work in the literature on AI and Law and suggestions for further improvement of the reason model. (shrink)

In this introduction I give an overview of Carole Hafner’s work and discuss the papers in this volume. The final section offers some more personal reminiscences of Carole and her contribution to the AI and Law community, from myself and other colleagues.

This paper is an introduction to a virtual special issue of AI and Law exploring the legacy of the influential HYPO system of Rissland and Ashley. The papers included are: Arguments and cases: An inevitable intertwining, BankXX: Supporting legal arguments through heuristic retrieval, Modelling reasoning with precedents in a formal dialogue Game, A note on dimensions and factors, An empirical investigation of reasoning with legal cases through theory construction and application, Automatically classifying case texts and predicting outcomes, A factor-based definition (...) of precedential constraint and An improved factor based approach to precedential constraint. After describing HYPO, in this introduction to the special issue I look at various aspects of its influence on AI and Law: the developments led by Rissland at Amherst; the developments led by Ashley in Pittsburgh; the expression of these ideas in terms of rule based systems, and their subsequent formalisation; value based theories, which were inspired by a critique of HYPO; and contemporary approaches which revive the idea of dimensions. (shrink)

In this paper several recent factor- and dimension-based models of precedential constraint are formally investigated and an alternative dimension-based model is proposed. Simple factor- and dimension-based syntactic criteria are identified for checking whether a decision in a new case is forced, in terms of the relevant differences between a precedent and a new case, and the difference between absence of factors and negated factors in factor-based models is investigated. Then Horty’s and Rigoni’s recent dimension-based models of precedential constraint are critically (...) examined. An alternative to their reason models is proposed which is less expressive but arguably easier to apply in practice. (shrink)

Modern belief revision theory is based to a large extent on partial meet contraction that was introduced in the seminal article by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson that appeared in 1985. In the same year, Alchourrón and Makinson published a significantly different approach to the same problem, called safe contraction. Since then, safe contraction has received much less attention than partial meet contraction. The present paper summarizes the current state of knowledge on safe contraction, provides some new results (...) and offers a list of unsolved problems that are in need of investigation. (shrink)

The first issue of _Artificial Intelligence and Law_ journal was published in 1992. This special issue marks the 30th anniversary of the journal by reviewing the progress of the field through thirty commentaries on landmark papers and groups of papers from that journal.

This paper shows how two models of precedential constraint can be broadened to include legal information represented through dimensions. I begin by describing a standard representation of legal cases based on boolean factors alone, and then reviewing two models of constraint developed within this standard setting. The first is the “result model”, supporting only a fortiori reasoning. The second is the “reason model”, supporting a richer notion of constraint, since it allows the reasons behind a court’s decisions to be taken (...) into account. I then show how the initial representation can be modified to incorporate dimensional information and how the result and reason models can be adapted to this new dimensional setting. As it turns out, these two models of constraint, which are distinct in the standard setting, coincide once they are transposed to the new dimensional setting, yielding exactly the same patterns of constraint. I therefore explore two ways of refining the reason model of constraint so that, even in the dimensional setting, it can still be separated from the result model. (shrink)

In this article I argue for rule-based, non-monotonic theories of common law judicial reasoning and improve upon one such theory offered by Horty and Bench-Capon. The improvements reveal some of the interconnections between formal theories of judicial reasoning and traditional issues within jurisprudence regarding the notions of the ratio decidendi and obiter dicta. Though I do not purport to resolve the long-standing jurisprudential issues here, it is beneficial for theorists both of legal philosophy and formalizing legal reasoning to see where (...) the two projects interact. (shrink)

This paper explores the extension of formal accounts of precedential constraint to make use of a factor hierarchy with intermediate factors. A problem arises, however, because constraints expressed in terms of intermediate factors may give different outcomes from those expressed only using base level factors. We argue that constraints that use only base level factors yield the correct outcomes, but that intermediate factors play an important role in the justification and explanation of those outcomes. The discussion is illustrated with a (...) running example. (shrink)