The concept of legal power is important in the law since, with regard to actions having legal effect, the “exercise of legal power” delimits those actions for which manifestation of intention to achieve a legal effect is essential for the effect to ensue. The paper proposes a definition that captures this feature of legal power and marks it off from “direct effect,” as well as from permissibility and practical ability to achieve the legal effect. This analysis of power is limited (...) to the “immediate” legal power of a physical person characterized by the power-holder achieving a legal result by the power-holder's own behaviour. It is argued that in the literature on power the concept of legal power is frequently construed in such a way that it becomes either too broad or too narrow. (shrink)

Legal terms, such as “ownership,”“contract,”“validity,”“negligence,” are used as middle terms in legal deduction. The paper distinguishes two problems regarding this use. One is the logical function of terms for deduction within a normative system. Specific problems dealt with in this connection are meaning, definition, and economy of expression. The other problem connected with middle terms is the “moulding” and possible manipulation of the meaning of legal terms, for arriving at desired conclusions in a given scheme of inference. It is indicated (...) how the moulding of contested legal concepts, if not restricted, will obscure the ratio of legal rules. This problem is relevant, inter alia, to arguments ex analogia in the law. (shrink)

We describe PADUA, a protocol designed to support two agents debating a classification by offering arguments based on association rules mined from individual datasets. We motivate the style of argumentation supported by PADUA, and describe the protocol. We discuss the strategies and tactics that can be employed by agents participating in a PADUA dialogue. PADUA is applied to a typical problem in the classification of routine claims for a hypothetical welfare benefit. We particularly address the problems that arise from the (...) extensive number of misclassified examples typically found in such domains, where the high error rate is a widely recognised problem. We give examples of the use of PADUA in this domain, and explore in particular the effect of intermediate predicates. We have also done a large scale evaluation designed to test the effectiveness of using PADUA to detect misclassified examples, and to provide a comparison with other classification systems. (shrink)

In this paper we apply a general account of practical reasoning to arguing about legal cases. In particular, we provide a reconstruction of the reasoning of the majority and dissenting opinions for a particular well-known case from property law. This is done through the use of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents to replicate the contrasting views involved in the actual decision. This reconstruction suggests that the reasoning involved can be separated into three distinct levels: factual and normative levels and a level connecting (...) the two, with conclusions at one level forming premises at the next. We begin by summarising our general approach, which uses instantiations of an argumentation scheme to provide presumptive justifications for actions, and critical questions to identify arguments which attack these justifications. These arguments and attacks are organised into argumentation frameworks to identify the status of individual arguments. We then discuss the levels of reasoning that occur in this reconstruction and the properties and significance of each of these levels. We illustrate the different levels with short examples and also include a discussion of the role of precedents within these levels of reasoning. (shrink)