This volume contains the Proceedings of the Nineteenth JURIX Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2006), December 7th–9th, Université Pantheon Assas – Paris II, France. This year we hoped to put two new topics on the agenda: Artificial Intelligence in police and intelligence services and the impact of AI on law, legal procedures and legal institutions. Despite the political attention paid to international crime, the war on terrorism and the concerns about the growing number of regulations, increase of administrative costs and overloading of courts, too few contributions about these issues were submitted. Nevertheless, the large number of submissions shows that our interdisciplinary community is still growing and active.

This volume again covers a broad range of topics. Argumentation is central to legal reasoning and therefore it is no surprise that researchers have focused on computational theories of argumentation. In this book four papers are dedicated to this topic. Atkinson & Bench-Capon compare disputes as dialectical trees to other abstract systems for argument representation. Bex et al. focus on causal-abductive reasoning and default-style argumentation to deal with stories, evidence and generalisations in the legal domain. Prakken & Sartor study formal models of representation of presumptions and their effects on the burden of proof. Chorley & Bench-Capon add the possibility of State interventions to improve the outcome of previous research on an argument scheme for practical reasoning.

Typical to the legal field is the use of written knowledge sources, especially legal sources. These have been subject to AI&Law research for a long time, varying from structuring and accessing legal sources to using natural language processing techniques in order to determine the semantics of language utterances. This book contains four papers on legal sources. De Maat et al. explain how parsing can provide support for combining legal content stores of different providers. Saravanan et al. propose probabilistic graphical models for automatic text summarization. Klein et al. report on methods for retrieving relevant case law within the domain of tort law. Van Opijnen describes the problems encountered in the development of a citation standard and explains the Public Index within the Dutch judiciary.

Central to AI and consequently to AI&Law are knowledge representation and ontologies. The latter especially are becoming more and more popular due to developments in SemanticWeb research. In this book we have included four papers on these topics. Roth describes an evaluation method for determining the effectiveness of deterrence. Lindahl & Odelstad analyse intermediaries by using a theory of “intervenients”. Rubino et al. present a description of an ontology that should enable semantic access to digital legal information and clarify legal theoretical concepts. Hagiwara et al. propose a theory and an implementation which detects discordance in the text of an ordinance of the Toyama prefecture in Japan.

I am not a philosopher so I am also pleased to see some practical results of our theoretical reflections. This book contains three papers on applications. Zeleznikow & Bellucci explain how notions of fairness to interests are used in their Family_Mediator system. Van Zeeland et al. explain their Personal Injury Claims Express web-application. Toyama et al. explain how natural language processing can be used to support both the compilation of a standard bilingual dictionary and unifying translation equivalents of legal technical terms. Last but not least we have four short papers on various topics.

Acknowledgments

The JURIX 2006 Conference organizers express their warm thanks to Danièle Bourcier who organized the conference together with her colleagues and the Université Pantheon Assas – Paris II. We would also like to thank the people at the Leibniz Center for Law (UvA) for providing support for the review process.

For this Conference we selected 15 full papers and 4 short papers out of 29 contributions. The authors represented fifteen countries. Papers have been reviewed by members of the programme committee:

• Kevin Ashley (University of Pittsburgh)

• Trevor Bench-Capon (University of Liverpool)

• Danièle Bourcier (CERSA-CNRS, Université Paris II)

• Paul Bourgine (CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris)

• Karl Branting (BAE Systems Inc.)

• Jaime Delgado (Universitat Politècnia de Catalunya)

• Tom van Engers (University of Amsterdam)

• Aldo Gangemi (CNR-ISTC)

• Thomas F. Gordon (Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin)

• Eduard Hovy (University of Southern California)

• Ronald Leenes (Universiteit van Tilburg)

• Arno Lodder (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

• Ronald Loui (Washington University)

• Thorne McCarty (Rutgers University)

• Henry Prakken (Utrecht University & University of Groningen)

• Giovanni Sartor (University of Bologna)

• Erich Sweighofer (University of Vienna)

• Peter Spyns (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

• Andrew Stranieri (JustSyss Pty Ltd)

• Bart Verheij (Universiteit of Groningen)

• Maria Wimmer (University of Koblenz-Landau)

• Radboud Winkels (University of Amsterdam)

We would also like to thank all external reviewers. The conference would not have been possible without the time and effort put in by these people and so thanks are due to them all. I also take the opportunity to thank the invited speakers, Ron Loui and Burkhard Schaeffer, for their contribution. Finally, thanks are due to Jobien Sombekke and Rinke Hoekstra (University of Amsterdam) for struggling again with LATEX and succeeding in getting the final version of this book in good shape before the deadline.

I hope that both the conference and the book help the AI&Law community stay the vivid, inspiring, knowledge productive and collaborative bunch of researchers and practitioners it has been over the last two decades.

Tom M. van Engers, Program Chair