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10 Info. & Comm. Tech. L. 5 (2001)

handle is hein.journals/infctel10 and id is 1 raw text is: Information & Communications Technology Law, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2001 EDITORIAL D. M. PETERSON School of Computer Science and School of Education, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK J. A. BARNDEN School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK E. NISSAN School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of Greenwich, London, UK One of the interesting things about legal reasoning is that it challenges logic to broaden its scope. Logic began in ancient Greece as the theory of argument and debate, and in recent years it has made great advances through the application of a particular method. This is the method of the formal system, in which rules are used to manipulate syntactic structures written in a well-defined formal notation. The modern application of this method to logic began in the late 19th century (though its roots go further back), and has meant the distancing of logic from rhetoric and its alignment with mathematics. Generally speaking, the formal method works best under particular conditions: when we have certain knowledge of our premises; when one factor in an argument does not override another; when each step in an argument is independent; and when our terms are free of ambiguity, nuance and vagueness. And of course, in real, everyday reasoning these conditions seldom obtain. The formal method, then, may be a discovery but it is also a decision, and the question arises as to whether this decision has narrowed the scope of logic in order to increase its power and clarity. Accordingly, when we apply logic to a real life domain such as legal reasoning or scientific enquiry, we may encounter a tension between the de- mands of formal clarity and elegance on the one hand and those of the details and realities of the domain on the other: optimists claiming that formal systems can be extended so as to capture some of the relevant 'rough ground'; and pessimists claiming that we need to use alternative methods. The issue comes into particular focus when techniques of artificial intelligence (Al) are applied in order to model or support legal reasoning, since this requires that the reasoning in question be specified and represented in detail. And here we find a divide between a 'neat' school which favours extensions of classical logic, such as deontic and non-monotonic logics, formal argumentation frameworks and for- mal dialogue games, and a 'scruffy' school which favours methods such as case-based reasoning and argument schemas. ISSN 1360-0834 print/ISSN 1469-8404 online/01 /010005-03 @ 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1360083012005542 0

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