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3 A.I. & L. 1 (1995-1996)

handle is hein.journals/artinl3 and id is 1 raw text is: Artificial Intelligence and Law 3: 1-4, 1995 © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Editor's Introduction Special Issue: Intelligent Legal Text-Based Systems As the worldwide publication of legal information has experienced an explosive growth, it is not surprising that computer-assisted legal research (CALR) systems have become an essential tool of the legal profession. For researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) and law, two questions naturally arise: i) how can AI techniques which include knowledge representation, rule-based, case-based, and probabilistic inference, heuristic search and machine learning be adapted to the needs of legal text retrieval, and ii) to what extent can these techniques improve the state of the art in legal text retrieval? In this Special Issue, we consider three innovative approaches to legal text retrieval, each utilizing Al techniques and each embodied in a working system that is currently or soon to be in commercial use. Since the 1970's, the potential for artificial intelligence to enhance, or even revolution- ize, the process of legal research has been explored by a handful of researchers who have developed AI-based retrieval models. These models, based on a variety of techniques including semantic networks (Hafner 1981), case-based reasoning (Rissland and Ashley 1987) and neural nets (Rose and Belew 1989), resulted in the creation of small scale demonstration systems with intriguing capabilities. However, the difficulty and expense of acquiring and delivering a legal text database made it impractical to go beyond the stage of research prototypes, and few outside the research community were aware of these experiments. Today, the widespread availability of CD-ROM technology and the Internet is opening the door for innovation in CALR to become practical. For example, on the Internet one can find uncopyrighted full text of the U.S. Coder, recent U.S. Supreme Court and Court of Appeals opinions2, Canadian Federal laws and Canadian Court decisions since 19933, and Australian Commonwealth laws and High Court opinions since 19504. Although the text available today represents only a small fraction of a complete legal document collec- tion, the pressure of consumers and advocacy groups is influencing more courts and gov- ernment agencies to create public archives of legal documents. And with CD-ROM technology, it is possible to deliver a large database of legal text with search capabilities at a low cost - for example, Tax Analysts (a non-profit corporation) offers a very inexpen- sive CD containing all U.S. Internal Revenue code, regulations, rulings, procedures, and tax-related Federal court decisions since 1990 (more than 15,000 cases) - 550 million 1http://thomas.loc.gov 2 http://www.law.comell.edu 3 http://canada.justice.gc.ca 4 http://austlii.law.uts.edu.au

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