Horty and Bench-Capon on A Factor-based Definition of Precedential Constraint

Professor Dr. John F. Horty of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and Professor Dr. Trevor J. M. Bench-Capon of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, have published A factor-based definition of precedential constraint, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 20, 181-214.

Here is the abstract:

This paper describes one way in which a precise reason model of precedent could be developed, based on the general idea that courts are constrained to reach a decision that is consistent with the assessment of the balance of reasons made in relevant earlier decisions. The account provided here has the additional advantage of showing how this reason model can be reconciled with the traditional idea that precedential constraint involves rules, as long as these rules are taken to be defeasible. The account presented is firmly based on a body of work that has emerged in AI and Law. This work is discussed, and there is a particular discussion of approaches based on theory construction, and how that work relates to the model described in this paper.

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: DEON 2012

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 27 February 2012 and full paper submission deadline of 5 March 2012 — has been issued for DEON 2012: The 11th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, to be held 16-18 June 2012, at the University of Bergen, in Bergen, Norway.

Papers are invited on general topics, and on the “special theme” of “Deontic Logic and Social Choice.” The general topics are:

• the logical study of normative reasoning, including formal systems of deontic logic, defeasible normative reasoning, logics of action, logics of time, and other related areas of logic;
• the formal analysis of normative concepts and normative systems;
• the formal specification of aspects of norm-governed multi-agent systems and autonomous agents, including (but not limited to) the representation of rights, authorization, delegation, power, responsibility and liability;
• normative aspects of protocols for communication, negotiation and multi-agent decision making;
• the formal representation of legal knowledge;
• the formal specification of normative systems for the management of bureaucratic processes in public or private administration;
• applications of normative logic to the specification of database integrity constraints.

The special theme topics are:

• Normative system selection and optimization
• Merging and aggregation of norms
• Compliance and enforcement strategies for norms
• Game theoretic aspects of deontic reasoning
• Norms, culture and and shared values
• Violation detection and norm creation mechanisms
• Simulation of dynamics in normative systems
• Emergence of norms
• Norm change

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT IAAIL.

JURIX 2011: Accepted Papers

Accepted papers have been announced for JURIX 2011: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 14-16 December 2011, at the University of Vienna Centre for Legal Informatics, in Vienna, Austria.

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.

Boella, Governatori et al. on A Formal Study on Legal Compliance and Interpretation

Professor Guido Boella of Università degli Studi di Torino Dipartimento di Informatica , Dr. Guido Governatori of the NICTA Queensland Research Laboratory, and colleagues, presented A Formal Study on Legal Compliance and Interpretation, at NMR 2010: The 13th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, held 14-16 May 2010, at Sutton Place, Toronto, Canada.

Click here to access a zip file containing the full text of the paper.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

This paper proposes a logical framework to capture the norm change power and the limitations of the judicial system in revising the set of constitutive rules defining the concepts on which the applicability of norms is based. In particular, we reconstruct the legal arguments leading to an extensive or restrictive interpretation of norms.

May 14-16, 2010: NMR 2010: The 13th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning

NMR 2010: The 13th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, will be held 14-16 May 2010, at Sutton Place, Toronto, Canada.

Click here for the conference program, and a zip file containing full text of the conference papers (scroll down).

Two sub-workshops taking place in conjunction with NMR 2010 may be of particular interest to legal informatics and communication researchers:

• The Subworkshop on Preferences & Norms; and
• The Subworkshop on Argument, Dialog & Decision.

Click here for the conference program, including the subworkshop programs, and a zip file containing full text of the conference papers, including the subworkshop papers (scroll down).

Call for Papers: GandALF 2010: International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, & Formal Verification

A call for papers, with abstract submission deadline of 21 March 2010 and paper submission deadline of 28 March 2010, has been issued for GandALF 2010: The First International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification, to be held 17-18 June 2010 in Minori, Italy.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Automata Theory
• Automated Deduction
• Logical aspects of Computational Complexity
• Concurrency and Distributed computation
• Decision Procedures
• Deductive, Compositional, and Abstraction Techniques for Verification
• Finite Model Theory
• First-order and Higher-order Logics
• Formal Languages
• Formal Methods for Complex Systems (Interactive Systems, Systems Biology,…)
• Games and Automata for Verification
• Game Semantics
• Game Theory
• Hybrid, Embedded, and Mobile Systems Verification
• Logics of Programs
• Modal and Temporal Logics
• Model Checking
• Models of Reactive and Real-Time Systems
• Program Analysis and Software Verification
• Specification and Verification of Finite and Infinite-state Systems
• Synthesis and Execution”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dario Della Monica.

Call for Papers: NMR 2010 & Subworkshops on Preferences & Norm and on Argument, Dialog & Decision

[NOTE: As of 2 February 2010, the submission deadline for the Subworkshop on Preferences & Norm has been extended to 15 February 2010, per Frederic Koriche.]

Calls for papers, all of which have submissions deadlines of 29 January 2010 [but see extended deadline noted above], have been issued for NMR 2010: The 13th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, and particularly its Subworkshop on Preferences & Norm and its Subworkshop on Argument, Dialog & Decision. Both events will be held 14-16 May 2010, at Sutton Place, Toronto, Canada.

For the Subworkshop on Preferences & Norm, papers are invited on the following topics:

• preference languages
• preference semantics
• defeasible logics
• reasoning about preferences
• preference-based planning
• preferences in constraint programming
• preferences in logic programming
• preferences in multi-agent systems
• preference revision and fusion
• preference elicitation
• preference learning
• preference modeling frameworks
• prima facie obligations
• deontic dilemmas
• normative multiagent systems
• formal models of norm change
• merging normative systems
• permissive norms
• epistemic norms
• constitutive norms
• imperatives

For the Subworkshop on Argument, Dialog and Decision, papers are invited on the following topics:

• semantics
• proof theory
• complexity and resource limitations
• applications to epistemic and practical reasoning
• applications to informal theories of argumentation
• comparison with other types of nonmonotonic logic
• the development of argument-based logical systems in formal models of multi-agent reasoning and interaction, such as:
• fact finding investigations
• negotiation
• distributed sense-making
• dispute resolution and mediation
• decision making

Specialized calls have also been issued for the conference’s other Subworkshops, the submission deadline for all of which is 29 January 2010, and which may also be of interest to legal informatics/communication researchers:

• Declarative Programming for NMR
• Action and Belief Change
• Commonsense and NMR for Ontologies
• NMR and Uncertainty

For the main NMR 2010 conference, papers are invited on the following topics:

• foundations of non-monotonic reasoning,
• default reasoning,
• representing actions and planning,
• belief revision and information fusion,
• reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty,
• answer set programming,
• belief updating and inconsistency handling,
• similarity-based reasoning,
• empirical studies of reasoning strategies,
• argument-based non-monotonic logics,
• abductive reasoning, algorithms and implementations,
• non-monotonic logics in multi-agent interaction, including negotiation and dispute resolution,
• non-monotonic reasoning for ontologies,
• declarative programming for non-monotonic reasoning, and
• reasoning with preferences.

For more information, please see the main conference Website.

HT Frederic Koriche.

Lundström on the Formal Modeling of Games of Language and Adversarial Argumentation

Dr. Jenny Eriksson Lundström of Uppsala Universitet Department of Informatics and Media has published her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled On the Formal Modeling of Games of Language and Adversarial Argumentation: A Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence Approach (2009). Legal argumentation is discussed in several sections. Here is the abstract:

“Argumentation is a highly dynamical and dialectical process drawing on human cognition. Successful argumentation is ubiquitous to human interaction. Comprehensive formal modeling and analysis of argumentation presupposes a dynamical approach to the following phenomena: the deductive logic notion, the dialectical notion and the cognitive notion of justified belief. For each step of an argumentation these phenomena form networks of rules which determine the propositions to be allowed to make sense as admissible, acceptable, and accepted.

“We present a formal logic framework for a computational account of formal modeling and systematical analysis of the dynamical, exhaustive and dialectical aspects of adversarial argumentation and dispute. Our approach addresses the mechanisms of admissibility, acceptability and acceptance of arguments in adversarial argumentation by use of metalogic representation and Artificial Intelligence-techniques for dynamical problem solving by exhaustive search.

“We elaborate on a common framework of board games and argumentation games for pursuing the alternatives facing the adversaries in the argumentation process conceived as a game. The analogy to chess is beneficial as it incorporates strategic and tactical operations just as argumentation. Drawing on an analogy to board games like chess, the state space representation, well researched in Artificial Intelligence, allows for a treatment of all possible arguments as paths in a directed state space graph. It will render a game leading to the most wins and fewest losses, identifying the most effective game strategy. As an alternate visualization, the traversal of the state space graph unravels and collates knowledge about the given situation/case under dispute. Including the private knowledge of the two parties, the traversal results in an increased knowledge of the case and the perspectives and arguments of the participants.

“As we adopt metalogic as formal basis, arguments used in the argumentation, expressed in a non-monotonic defeasible logic, are encoded as terms in the logical argumentation analysis system. The advantage of a logical formalization of argumentation is that it provides a symbolic knowledge representation with a formally well-formed semantics, making the represented knowledge as well as the behavior of knowledge representation systems reasoning comprehensible. Computational logic as represented in Horn Clauses allows for expression of substantive propositions in a logical structure. The non-monotonic nature of defeasible logic stresses the representational issues, i.e. what is possible to capture in non-monotonic reasoning, while from the (meta)logic program, the sound computation on what it is possible to compute, and how to regard the semantics of this computation, are established.”

HT defeasible.org.