Ebook: Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

It was twenty years ago today…

The first JURIX conference was organized in 1988, so the 2007 conference is the twentieth one. At the first conference, the audience was completely Dutch, except for one German speaking attendee, so it was decided to communicate in English.

The Dutch JURIX community started its activities some time before this first conference, indeed twenty years ago. Interestingly enough, the name JURIX existed even before JURIX had been founded. We believe it was at the 1989 Vancouver ICAIL conference that Uri Schild surprised Dutch participants by saying: “You stole my name, I invented JURIX!”. Apparently, in 1986 or 1987, Schild had published an article in which he called a knowledge system JURIX. Of course Uri Schild did not mind, but the JURIX board wanted to be sure and let Uri sign a contract that allowed their use of the name. We are glad that Uri Schild is on this year's Program Committee.

Over the years JURIX has become more and more international. JURIX is officially Dutch/Belgium, more precisely (cf. http://jurix.nl): “Its [board] members are research groups from most Dutch universities and a Flemish university, KU Leuven.” The conference papers are in majority from non-Dutch authors, and since 2002 JURIX is held outside the Netherlands and Belgium every other year: London (2002), Berlin (2004), Paris (2006), and next year in Florence.

Just as the 19th JURIX conference had 19 contributions (out of 29 submissions), the 20th JURIX conference has 20 (out of 34 submissions): 15 full papers, and 5 short papers. The authors are not only from a wide range of countries, but many of the authoring teams were multi-national, viz.: Australia/Netherlands/Italy; Belgium (2); Brazil; France; Germany/Greece/Italy/Spain; India; Italy; Italy/Netherlands (3); Netherlands (3); Poland; Spain/United Kingdom; Sweden/Denmark; United Kingdom (2); USA; and USA/Italy.

Only 7 out of 20 contributions were (partly) Dutch. Italy has the most collaborations, namely 6. We have contributions from North-America, South America, Asia and Australia. Only Africa is missing, but will maybe appear at JURIX in the future, because there are several collaborations going on with various African countries.

Over the years, women have already played an important role in the sometimes male dominated technology and law world, but it is good to see that 70% of the papers were (partly) written by female authors and more than half of the papers (8/15) have a female first author.

There are papers by two authors (9), three authors (6), four authors (2), five authors (1), and seven authors (2). There is not a single single-authored paper! Only the invited speakers stand on their own, and during the conference dinner Delise will – on her own – bring some musical joy.

On Thursday, the Dutch law professor Janneke Gerards will address in her invited talk theoretical models she develops that can help judges to draft grounded verdicts in cases where fundamental rights are involved. In her thesis she tackled 'equal treatment', and she is currently exploring other fundamental rights in a large project. This project is aimed at developing models and guidelines for judicial reasoning in fundamental rights cases, on the basis of legal-theoretical research and comparative case-law analyses.

On Friday, the invited talk by the American law professor David A. Larson explores how the mediation process can be enriched by the use of technology. His observations on the current youth are illustrating the necessity: “Children are switching between cellular telephones, text messaging, e-mail, instant messaging, and Internet chat rooms seamlessly to establish a constant presence in the universe. They are becoming always available, always connected.”

Most accepted papers can largely be fitted into either work on argumentation or work on ontology. Argumentation has been a JURIX-topic during all past years, and the interest in ontology has revived recently with Semantic Web initiatives.

Case law is approached from different angles. Mochales & Moens discuss how arguments can be retrieved automatically in Study on Sentence Relations in the Automatic Detection of Argumentation in Legal Cases. Recommending techniques are novel for our field and applied by Wildeboer, Klein & Uijttenbroek in search of one of AI & Law's holy grails: Explaining the Relevance of Court Decisions to Laymen. For quite some years now, Trevor Bench-Capon has been exploring Case-based reasoning, and this year he integrates CBR with argument schemes in two papers: the first paper has Adam Wyner as the leading author and is entitled Argument Schemes for Legal Case-based Reasoning; the second paper is written with the same first author and Katie Atkinson and is entitled Arguments, Values and Baseballs: Representation of Popov v. Hayashi.

Huizinga (Homo Ludens, 1938), and Bob Dylan (“ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game”, 1976) drew parallels between law and games. In the mid 1990s this topic was popular in AI & Law (e.g., Gordon, Loui, Lodder), and this year two papers successfully continue on this topic. In Success chances in argument games: a probabilistic approach to legal disputes, a group of authors headed by Riveret links the chances of winning arguments to the probabilities of winning claims. In Legal rules and argumentation in a metalogic framework, the Scandinavians Eriksson Lundström, Fischer Nilsson & Hamfelt introduce a simple, straightforward mechanism illustrating that a legal dispute is just a balancing of pro and con arguments of which no one knows the outcome for sure.

In 1993 JURIX had a number of papers on legal drafting, amongst others on the famous LEDA-system. This year we have Agnoloni et al. reporting on the DALOS-project in Building an ontological support for multilingual legislative drafting. The technique of graphs is used to analyse legal drafting by Bourcier & Mazzega in their Codification, Law Article and Graphs. The existing boundaries of legal drafting software are explored by Hafner & Lauritsen and they propose new paths to walk on in Extending the power of automated legal drafting technology. When laws are enacted it is good if the public knows of their existence. The internet is often used for that purpose, and Washington & Griffith assess some existing websites, and focus on how using XML and internet can increase transparency. The development of such standards for legislation is described in Proposed XML Standards for Law: MetaLex and LKIF by Boer, Winkels & Vitali.

Categorisation and systematization can be very helpful to lawyers. De Maat & Winkels aim to do this with legal norms, and distinguish different layers in Categorisation of Norms. Whereas this former paper presents a general model, a specific ontology for patent law has been developed in the context of the Patexpert-project, and a complex ontological framework is described by Giereth et al. in A Modular Framework for Ontology-based Representation of Patent Information.

Argumentation is central in law, but it is hard to develop software that lawyers find of use. Schweers & Verheij want to take the software a step further than the presently existing technology in Beyond boxes and arrows: argumentation support in terms of the knowledge structure of a legal topic.

A nice overview of the state of art in Online Dispute Resolution is provided by Sefora Junqueira & Evandro Costa in their Computer Intelligent Support for the ADR/ODR Domain, and completes this overview.

In the short papers various topics are covered: ontology of the Polish Commercial Companies Code, a methodology for modelling legal workflows, content management and version management of legislation, representation of deadlines, and an ontology for summarizing documents.

This very fine selection of papers could not have been collected without the submissions by all authors, whom we would like to thank very much for their efforts. We would also like to thank the members of the program committee for their efforts to assess the quality of the submissions, and to provide valuable comments to the authors:

Kevin D. Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK

Emilia Bellucci, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK

Danièle Bourcier, CNRS CERSA, University of Paris 2, France

Frances M.T. Brazier, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Joost Breuker, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Aspassia Daskalopulu, University of Thessaly, Greece

Tom van Engers, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Thomas F. Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany

Carole D. Hafner, Northeastern University, USA

Frank van Harmelen, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Jaap van den Herik, Leiden University & Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Paul E.M. Huygen, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Peter Keyngnaert, AKTOR Knowledge Technology, Belgium

Gloria T. Lau, Thomson FindLaw & Stanford University, USA

Arno R. Lodder, VU University Amsterdam & CEDIRE.org, The Netherlands (chair)

Ronald P. Loui, Washington University, St. Louis, USA

Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven, Belgium

Laurens Mommers, eLaw@Leiden, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Antoinette Muntjewerff, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Ajit Narayanan, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

Kees van Noortwijk, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Anja Oskamp, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Monica Palmirani, CIRSFID, University of Bologna, Italy

Marta Poblet, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Henry Prakken, Groningen University & Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Paulo Quaresma, Universidade de Évora, Portugal

Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Italy

Burkhard Schafer, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Uri Schild, Bar Ilan University, Israel

Daniela Tiscornia, ITTIG-CNR, Italy

Leon van der Torre, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Bart Verheij, Groningen University, The Netherlands

Kees de Vey Mestdagh, Groningen University, The Netherlands

Wim Voermans, State and Administrative Law, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Douglas Walton, University of Winnipeg, Canada

Radboud Winkels, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

John Zeleznikow, Victoria University, Melbourne

In addition, the day before and after the main conference the following workshops and tutorial are scheduled:

• Modelling Legal Cases (organizer: Katie Atkinson);

• Multimedia Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques in Law (organizers: Xavier Binefa, Marie-France Moens, José Manuel López-Cobo & Pompeu Casanovas);

• and on Saturday:

• Access to Justice: putting the “i” of intelligence into wiki (organizers: Esther Hoorn, Burkhard Schafer & Laurens Mommers)

• Legislative XML (organizers: Radboud Winkels & Enrico Francescon)

• Tutorial on Technology Enhanced Dispute Resolution by John Zeleznikow

Finally, we would like to thank the E.M. Meijers Institute for Jurispudential Research for its practical support, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for its financial support, in organizing the 20th JURIX conference in Leiden.

Cf. www.emmeijers.nl, www.knaw.nl, cli.vu, elaw.leiden.edu, and www.jurix.nl.

The quality of legislative drafting process at European and national levels is highly influenced by the legal drafters control over the multilingual complexity of European legislation and over the linguistic and conceptual issues involved in its transposition into national legislations. The DALOS project aims at ensuring coherence and alignment in the legislative language, providing law-makers with an ontological-linguistic resource and knowledge management tools to support the multilingual legislative drafting process. This paper outlines the current activity within DALOS, aiming at the construction of a two-level knowledge (ontological and linguistic) resource to be used as support for multilingual legislative drafting.

Electronic government invariably involves XML and electronic law: legislation is as essential to public administration as the ball is to a ball game. This paper gives an overview of two XML standard proposals dealing with two complementary aspects of electronic legislation – the documents themselves as a carrier, and an institutional reality they represent – in a coherent way: MetaLex XML and the Legal Knowledge Interchange format (LKIF). MetaLex XML is well on its way to becoming formal and de facto standard for legislation in XML. LKIF is yet to be submitted as a proposed standard. LKIF includes some interesting innovations from an AI & Law perspective.

Policy makers, judges, citizens all deplore the increasing complexity of law. Codification is traditionally one of the best ways to sustain the dynamic and necessary evolution of laws. In this paper we analyze the French environmental code (2000) to understand how the drafters have organized the previous laws scattered in various fields of law into the structure of a hierarchical table of contents. Relying on graph representation, we observe this architecture through the various levels of its organization and connections with other legal corpuses. Among the lot of information that this representation brings, we will note the new function of the article of law in the pyramid of laws. The article is no more one axiom, one rule as in the Civil Code (1804): it becomes an articulation between both an upper and a lower (intra-article) hierarchy, embedded in a network of links. So doing we also find some invariant distributions – like the Pareto-Zipf one – that shape various statistical distributions of the vertices and edges of the legal graph. We will conclude by proposing new comparative perspectives between legal sources and between Codes.

In this paper we show how to address legal argumentation as a dialectic process using a metalogic defeasible framework. We provide a formal model in which, the argumentation of the parties can be analyzed computationally. Further we argue that the accommodation of legal reasoning by using hierarchical defeasible theories of [7] provides a comprehensive alternative for constructing legally acceptable and meaningful theories of case-adapted jurisprudence with the purpose of facilitating legal audits and the preparation of appeals to a higher tribunal.

In this paper, we present a new ontology-based formalism for representing patent information. The framework defines concepts and relations for the major aspects of patent information pertaining to patent metadata, patent content structure, patent semantics, and patent classification. Each aspect is logically covered by an individual ontology module. The paper further discusses aspects of ontology learning and integration of non-textual information for the patent domain.

This paper analyzes some fundamental limits posed by the dominant paradigm presently seen in legal drafting software, and describes a new drafting system architecture that has potential to offer significant benefits in expressive power and user experience. A scenario based on a customer service representative drafting a letter in response to a consumer complaint is used to illustrate the issues and the proposed design.

This paper presents a framework for Alternative Dispute Resolution and Online Dispute Resolution domain based on The Harvard Negotiation Project's concepts. The framework addresses a basic Alternative Dispute Resolution procedure and reports on the possibilities of the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques to support parties developing their reasoning and understanding abilities, aiming at enhancing the chances of success.

In a lot of existing legal knowledge based applications, the underlying legal model does not retain isomorphism with the original legal text. Parts of the text have not been modelled, and other parts have been simplified to single if-then-else clauses. This makes these models difficult to validate, maintain and re-use. In this article we propose to make an intermediate model, in which the original structure of the legal text is still represented. A first step is the detection and classification of norms in sentences in legal texts. We present a classification of norms or provisions based on the analyses of a large body of Dutch law. The classification covers all text constructs found thus far and we claim the use of typical sentence structures enables automation of a large part of this task.

We report the results of experiments which prove that the analysis of relations between sentences increase the accuracy in the automatic detection of arguments in legal cases. We treat the search of arguments as a classification problem. Our corpus is a human-annotated and automatically-extracted test set from a collection of legal cases of the European Court of Human Rights. We obtain an increment around 8% in the general accuracy compared to previous experiments due to the addition of new features that study the relations between the text sentences.

The outcome of a legal dispute, namely, the decision of its adjudicator, is uncertain, and both parties develop their strategies on the basis of their appreciation of the probability that the adjudicator will accept their arguments or the arguments of their adversary. Costs and gains have to be balanced in light of this uncertainty in order to identify the most convenient strategies. This paper provides a probabilistic approach embedded into an argumentation framework to capture this uncertainty and its use to determine the expected utility to engage in a legal dispute.

Today's argumentation software mostly emphasizes the logical structure of reasoning, and especially the structure as it can be represented in boxes-and-arrows style diagrams. In this paper an alternative way of providing argumentation support is proposed. A content-oriented, relatively lowtech tool is presented, based on the knowledge structure of a legal topic, inspired by the structure of legal treatises. The design for this system builds on research in the areas of law, logic, argumentation theory and cognitive ergonomics. A small user evaluation has been performed to examine the usefulness of the system. We show that supporting legal reasoning based on the knowledge structure of a legal topic can be an interesting foundation for argumentation software.

Since the 1990s many legislatures have made their documents and activities available to the public through the Internet. While this initial phase of transparency met some needs, it is no longer sufficient simply to make legislative documents available electronically. Legislative systems that seek to be authoritative must meet the highest possible standard in at least five key areas: 1) accuracy 2) timeliness 3) completeness 4) clarity and 5) context. This paper applies these criteria to the evaluation and design of legislative websites. First, an evaluation of the European Parliament and the United States Congress systems reveals how some of these standards are being met. Second, a case study illustrates how the five criteria have been built into the XML design of U.S. congressional legislative data. In conclusion, we discuss the implications for legislature transparency.

In the context of intelligent disclosure of case law, we report on our findings with respect to the presentation of relevant court decisions back to the laymen users. For this presentation we first localize the relevant legal concepts in the cases using shallow NLP techniques. Hereafter we investigated the use of techniques from the field of recommender systems, i.e. keyword style explanation and influence style explanation, to present the cases to the user in an understandable way. In order to find out if we succeeded in that respect, we conducted a small user satisfaction research. It shows promising results, and gives us some directions for future research.

In this paper we use the notion of argument schemes to analyse some leading approaches to case-based reasoning in Law. We identify a set of argument schemes that can express the argument provided by such systems and draw attention to some important differences between the various approaches.

In this paper, we model a recent legal case as presented in a court of first instance using argument schemes and an argumentation framework, providing a formal analysis of the case and how the outcome was determined. The paper contributes to the body of literature that formally analyses legal cases in terms of arguments and argument schemes. It is novel in that we analyse a case in a court of first instance, so we have arguments about facts, qualifications of intermediate predicates, and the application of legal rules. We show the importance of undercutters in relating principles to the specific case.