Applications Invited: Summer School on Law and Logic

Applications, with a submission deadline of 31 March 2013, are invited for the Summer School on Law and Logic to be held 15-26 July 2013 at European University Institute in Florence.

Here is background information:

Basic course: Logic, argumentation, and legal reason

The first part of the class (seven days) is the basic course: “Logic, argumentation, and legal reason.” This basic course offers a detailed presentation of propositional and predicate deductive logic, as well as the use of logic for capturing representing deontic and Hohfeldian modalities, analogical reasoning and inference to the best explanation. It also presents some aspects of non-deductive reasoning in law, such as defeasible reasoning, including argumentation schemes and inductive reasoning. Throughout the course we pay careful attention to the way in which these methods of argument can assist legal analysis. We believe that the kind of background in formal logic we offer in this course can be a very powerful tool for use in legal theory, for developing doctrinal legal research, for working in legal informatics (the application of computer programs to the analysis of law), and, more generally, for the practice of law.

Special course: Logic, argumentation and the law of evidence

The second part of the course (three days) is a special course: “Logic, argumentation and the law of evidence.” In this part of the course we focus on the methods of argument and reasoning that are specific to doctrines of Evidence law, both in European jurisdictions and in the United States. It includes: comparison of doctrines of evidence law in European jurisdiction and the United States, a detailed explanation of Bayesian reasoning and its application to evidentiary reasoning, evidence and argumentation theory, presumptions, burdens of proof and burdens of production, concepts of relevance in the law of evidence, the logic and epistemology of testimony, and modes of logical inference, causality, and scientific evidence in evidence law.

The Summer School is jointly hosted by the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and the Harvard Law School (Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.). It is also sponsored by the Cardozo Law School (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.), Cirsfid-University of Bologna (Italy), the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), the European Academy of Legal Theory, and a grant from the Erasmus Lifelong Learning Programme.

The professors of the Summer School:

Scott Brewer, Henry Prakken, Nino Rotolo, Bartosz Brozek, Giovanni Sartor, Michele Taruffo, Peter Tillers

HT IAAIL

Applications Invited: Summer School on Law and Logic 2012

Applications are invited to the Summer School on Law and Logic 2012, to be held 16-20 July 2012, in Florence, Italy.

Here is a description of the school:

The Summer School on Law and Logic is the first course ever to provide a comprehensive introduction to the wide variety of uses of logic in the law. Our aim at this Summer School is to provide law students, graduate law students, and legal professionals with a knowledge of the methods of formal logic and the ability to apply those methods to the analysis and critical evaluation of legal arguments and sources of law (including statutes, cases, regulations, constitutional provisions).

The Summer School includes the basics of propositional and predicate deductive logic, as well as the use of logic for capturing representing deontic and Hohfeldian modalities, analogical reasoning and inference to the best explanation. It also addresses presents some aspects of non-deductive reasoning in law, such as defeasible reasoning, including argumentation schemes and inductive reasoning.

The school’s faculty are:

• Scott Brewer
• Henry Prakken
• Nino Rotolo
• Giovanni Sartor
• Peter Tillers

The hosts and sponsors of the school are:

• European University Institute
• Harvard Law School
• Cardozo School of Law
• CIRSFID-University of Bologna
• University of Groningen
• European Academy of Legal Theory

For more information, please see the school’s Website.

HT Giovanni Sartor.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2011

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 5 September 2011 — has been issued for JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 14-16 December 2011 at the University of Vienna, in Vienna, Austria.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Henry Prakken.

Bench-Capon & Prakken on Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law

Professor Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and Professor Dr. Henry Prakken of the University of Groningen Faculty of Law have published Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

This paper studies the use of hypothetical and value-based reasoning in US Supreme-Court cases concerning the United States Fourth Amendment. Drawing upon formal AI & Law models of legal argument a semi-formal reconstruction is given of parts of the Carney case, which has been studied previously in AI & law research on case-based reasoning. As part of the reconstruction, a semi-formal proposal is made for extending the formal AI & Law models with forms of metalevel reasoning in several argument schemes. The result is compared with Rissland’s (1989) analysis in terms of dimensions and Ashley’s (2008) analysis in terms of his process model of legal argument with hypotheticals.

Bex et al. on A Hybrid Formal Theory of Arguments, Stories, and Criminal Evidence

Dr. Floris J. Bex of The University of Dundee Argumentation Research Group, and colleagues, have published A Hybrid Formal Theory of Arguments, Stories, and Criminal Evidence, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

This paper presents a theory of reasoning with evidence in order to determine the facts in a criminal case. The focus is on the process of proof, in which the facts of the case are determined, rather than on related legal issues, such as the admissibility of evidence. In the literature, two approaches to reasoning with evidence can be distinguished, one argument-based and one story-based. In an argument-based approach to reasoning with evidence, the reasons for and against the occurrence of an event, e.g., based on witness testimony, are central. In a story-based approach, evidence is evaluated and interpreted from the perspective of the factual stories as they may have occurred in a case, e.g., as they are defended by the prosecution. In this paper, we argue that both arguments and narratives are relevant and useful in the reasoning with and interpretation of evidence. Therefore, a hybrid approach is proposed and formally developed, doing justice to both the argument-based and the narrative-based perspective. By the formalization of the theory and the associated graphical representations, our proposal is the basis for the design of software developed as a tool to make sense of the evidence in complex cases.

Click here for Dr. Bex’s earlier post on this topic at the VoxPopuLII blog.

Prakken on Reconstructing Popov v. Hayashi in a Framework for Argumentation with Structured Arguments and Dungean Semantics

Professor Dr. Henry Prakken of the University of Groningen Faculty of Law has posted Reconstructing Popov v. Hayashi in a Framework for Argumentation with Structured Arguments and Dungean Semantics, forthcoming in Knowledge Engineering Review. Here is the abstract:

In this article the argumentation structure of the court’s decision in the Popov v. Hayashi case is formalised in Prakken’s (2010) abstract framework for argument-based inference with structured arguments. In this framework, arguments are inference trees formed by applying two kinds of inference rules, strict and defeasible rules. Arguments can be attacked in three ways: attacking a premise, attacking a conclusion and attacking an inference. To resolve such conflicts, preferences may be used, which leads to three corresponding kinds of defeat, after which Dung’s (1995) abstract acceptability semantics can be used to evaluate the arguments. In the present paper the abstract framework is instantiated with strict inference rules corresponding to first-order logic and with defeasible inference rules for defeasible modus ponens and various argument schemes. The main techniques used in the formal reconstruction of the case are rule-exception structures and arguments about rule validity. Arguments about socio-legal values and the use of precedent cases are reduced to arguments about rule validity. The tree structure of arguments, with explicit subargument relations between arguments, is used to capture the dependency relations between the elements of the court’s decision.

May 10, 2010: ArgMAS 2010: The 7th International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems

ArgMAS 2010: The 7th International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems, will be held 10 May 2010, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The workshop is being held in conjunction with AAMAS 2010, the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, being held 10-14 May 2010, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Click here for the ArgMAS 2010 program (scroll far down).

Call for Papers: NonMon@30: Thirty Years of Nonmonotonic Reasoning

A call for papers, with submission deadline of 11 July 2010, has been issued for NonMon@30: Thirty Years of Nonmonotonic Reasoning, a conference to be held 22-25 October 2010, in Lexington, Kentucky, USA.

The call for papers states: “We invite papers in all areas of nonmonotonic reasoning, and especially encourage submissions underlying the role of nonmonotonic reasoning in artificial intelligence and knowledge representation.”

Noted legal informatics scholar Professor Henry Prakken is a member of the program committee.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Frederick Koriche.