Ebook: Argumentation Methods for Artificial Intelligence in Law

During a recent visit to China to give an invited lecture on legal argumentation I was asked a question about conventional opinion in western countries. If legal r- soning is thought to be important by those both inside and outside the legal prof- sion, why does there appear to be so little attention given to the study of legal logic? This was a hard question to answer. I had to admit there were no large or well-established centers of legal logic in North America that I could recommend as places to study. Going through customs in Vancouver, the customs officer asked what I had been doing in China. I told him I had been a speaker at a conf- ence. He asked what the conference was on. I told him legal logic. He asked 1 whether there was such a thing. He was trying to be funny, but I thought he had a good point. People will question whether there is such a thing as “legal logic”, and some recent very prominent trials give the question some backing in the common opinion. But having thought over the question of why so little attention appears to be given to legal logic as a mainstream subject in western countries, I think I now have an answer. The answer is that we have been looking in the wrong place.

Use of argumentation methods applied to legal reasoning is a relatively new field of study. Many vitally important problems of legal reasoning can be profitably studied in light of these new methods, even if they cannot all be solved in any single monograph. This book provides a survey of the leading problems, and outlines how future research using argumentation-based methods show great promise of leading to useful solutions. The problems studied include not only these of argument evaluation and argument invention, but also analysis of specific kinds of evidence commonly used in law, like witness testimony, circumstantial evidence, forensic evidence and character evidence. New tools for analyzing these kinds of evidence are introduced, like argument diagramming, abductive reasoning, an analysis of conditional relevance and a new dialectical model of explanation.