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20 A.I. & L. 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/artinl20 and id is 1 raw text is: Artif Intell Law (2012) 20:1-14
DOI 10.1007/s10506-012-9122-y
Introduction to special issue on modelling
Popov v. Hayashi
Katie Atkinson
Published online: 24 March 2012
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
1 Introduction to the special issue
One area of concern in research in Al and Law, going back to its earliest days, is
how to model and reason with legal cases. Concerning this task, the statement below
was made by Buchanan and Headrick (1970) in an article considered by many to be
the first specifically Al and Law paper. The statement gives a good characterisation
of the spirit of the problem of modelling legal cases and recognition is made of the
different uses that different representations might bring forth, as is shown through
the papers presented in this special issue.
Many times success or failure in solving a complex problem will hinge on
representing the problem correctly at the start. So the search for rules used by
a lawyer will not be over as soon as he can make some statements about his
priorities for legal principles and his heuristic rules. He must also be prepared
to recast these statements into other representations. Perhaps a more formal
representation will facilitate programming; perhaps using more general
concepts will increase the range of legal problems that can be solved; or
perhaps using more specific concepts in some places will make some problems
almost trivial. At any rate, this is an important and difficult consideration for
the designer of a system that does legal reasoning. (pp. 46-47)
There are numerous cases that have come to prominence in the Al and Law
literature over the years, covering different aspects of law. For example, taxation
law has been considered in relation to an analysis and software implementation of
the case of Eisner v. Macomber in McCarty (1995). Issues in property law are often
demonstrated using the famous case of Pierson v. Post, as in Berman and Hafner
K. Atkinson (E)
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Ashton Building, Ashton St,
Liverpool L69 3BX, UK
e-mail: K.M.Atkinson@liverpool.ac.uk

I Springer

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