We are delighted to announce the proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2019). The JURIX annual conference, organized under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge-Based Systems (http://www.jurix.nl), has been established as an internationally renowned forum for the exchange of ideas concerning theoretical models and practical applications developed in the broadly construed sphere of artificial intelligence (AI) and law research. Traditionally, this field has been concerned with legal knowledge representation and engineering, computational models of legal reasoning, and analyses of legal data. However, recent years have witnessed the application of machine learning tools to legally relevant tasks rising to prominence.

The constantly growing influence of AI on different spheres of social life has prompted the community’s emerging interest in the explainability, trustworthiness, and responsibility of intelligent systems—and not in vain, as a high-level expert group the European Commission convened this year published the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. It declared that the very first attribute of trustworthy AI was “lawfulness.” The research presented at JURIX conferences is an excellent example of interdisciplinary research integrating the methods and approaches from different branches of jurisprudence and computer science.

The 2019 edition of JURIX, which runs from 11 to 13 December, is hosted by the Ontological Engineering Group at the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Technical University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). For this edition, we have received 81 papers, from which 14 were selected as full papers (10 pages in the proceedings) and 17 as 6-page short papers. Moreover, three submissions have been accepted as demo presentations. These figures result in a total acceptance rate of 41.98% and a competitive 25.5% acceptance rate for full papers. The accepted papers cover a broad array of topics, from computational models of legal argumentation, case-based reasoning, legal ontologies, and evidential reasoning, through classification of different types of text in legal documents and comparing similarities and the relevance of judicial decisions, to issues of governmental transparency.

Two invited speakers have honored JURIX 2019 by kindly agreeing to deliver two keynote lectures: Danièle Bourcier and Francesca Toni. Daniéle Bourcier has been responsible for pioneering research in the field of law, computers, and linguistics—currently, she is a director of research emeritus at Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and leads the Law and Governance Technologies Department at the Centre for Administrative Science Research (CERSA) at the University of Paris II. She is actively involved in the AI and law community, currently serving as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Artificial Intelligence and Law. Francesca Toni is one of the most significant representatives of the computational argumentation research community. She is Professor of Computational Logic in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, a member of the AI research theme, and the leader of the Computational Logic and Argumentation research group (CLArg). Francesca Toni has contributed extensively to different topics in logic, agents-based systems, and argumentation, recently focusing her attention inter alia on the application of argumentation models to generate explanations.

Traditionally, the main JURIX conference is accompanied by co-located events comprising workshops and tutorials. This year’s edition welcomes seven workshops: the CEILI Workshop on Legal Data Analysis; GDPR Compliance—Theories, Techniques, Tools; IberLegal: NLP for Legal Domain in Languages of the Iberian Peninsula (Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque, and Portuguese); LegRegSW JURIX 2019 – A Legislation and Regulation Semantic Web; MIREL 2019 – Mining and Reasoning with Legal Texts; TeReCom – The 3rd Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance; XAILA 2019 – The EXplainable AI in Law Workshop; and Defeasible Logic for Normative Reasoning (a tutorial). The continuation of well-established events and the organization of entirely new ones provide a great added value to the JURIX conference, enhancing its thematic and methodological diversity and attracting members of the broader community. Since 2013, JURIX has also offered researchers entering the field as Ph.D. students the opportunity to present their work during the Doctoral Consortium session, and this edition is no exception. Finally, for the first time, this edition of JURIX offers the Industry SessionâĂŤa special event enabling business representatives to present their products to the academy to foster further discussions concerning state-of-the-art developments in legal tech.

Organizing this edition of the conference would not have been possible without the support of many people and institutions. Special thanks are due to the local organizing team chaired by Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel and Elena Montiel Ponsoda (https://jurix2019.oeg-upm.net), and the enthusiasm of UPM’s Vice Chancellor for Research and the outstanding AI researcher, Asunción Gómez-Pérez. We would like to thank the workshops’ and tutorials’ organizers for their excellent proposals and for the effort involved in organizing the events. We owe our gratitude to Monica Palmirani, who kindly assumed the function of the Doctoral Consortium Chair. We are particularly grateful to the 91 members of the Program Committee for their excellent work in the rigorous review process and for their participation in the discussions concerning borderline papers. Finally, we would like to thank the former and current JURIX executive committee and steering committee members not only for their support and advice but also generally for taking care of all the JURIX initiatives.

Michał Araszkiewicz, JURIX 2019 Program Chair

Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel, JURIX 2019 Organization Chair