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12 A.I. & L. 1 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/artinl12 and id is 1 raw text is: Artificial Intelligence and Law (2004) 12: 1-3 Foreword Some of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is now concentrating on the topic intelligent agents, as it has been known for some years. A different term that is used is electronic agents. In brief, these agents are software processes that can autonomously perform certain tasks in a network setting. Often these agents are described using terms that remind one of human behaviour: agents are autonomous, they are reactive and pro-active, they can commu- nicate, interact and co-operate with other agents, they may be mobile, they can adapt to their environment, they can learn and they may be creative. This does not imply that an electronic agent will possess all these characteristics, but it will possess some. Research on intelligent agents is still on-going, but one may already find some applications on the market, especially within an e-commerce setting. These applications are still mainly simple forms of electronic agents, with limited possibilities. From these applications, it became clear that the use of technologies like agents may cause legal problems. Moreover, the legal status of these agents is not clear and leads to questions like: are agents allowed to act autonomously when we are considering performing legal tasks? What is, or can be, the legal status of an agent? There are also questions concerning the rights and obligations of system administrators who allow agents to enter their systems. The community of Al and Law has mainly been concerned with research that may lead to AI-applications for legal practice, but has also tried to provide theoretical frameworks for the construction of such applications and build the underlying theories. Although, in theory, Al and Law could also include the legal aspects of the use of Al applications, there has been a dearth of such publications in this journal. However, in this special issue, a number of legal aspects of the use of agents are addressed. There is a reason for this. It is our belief that these legal issues are especially important when agents are developed to perform certain legal tasks or to support legal practice. Research concerning the potential use of electronic agents for legal applications, for instance to support lawyers in every day's practice has so far been scarce. But it can be expected that this is a very interesting area for the Al and Law community, both with regard to the development of practical applications as well as for the study of underlying theories.

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