JURIX 2012: 17-19 December

JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems is being held 17-19 December 2012, at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix2012

Click here for archived Twitter tweets (in .csv format) from the conference.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of workshops and tutorials.

HT @jurixfoundation

7 September: Extended CfP Deadline for JURIX 2012

The call for papers submission deadline for JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems has been extended to 7 September 2012.

Click here for the call for papers.

The conference will be held 17-19 December 2012 at the University of Amsterdam.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning 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 Dr. Rinke Hoekstra.

Bex and Walton: Burdens and Standards of Proof for Inference to the Best Explanation: Three Case Studies

Dr. Floris J. Bex of The University of Dundee Argumentation Research Group, and Professor Dr. Douglas Walton of the University of Windsor Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric, have published Burdens and standards of proof for inference to the best explanation: three case studies, forthcoming in Law, Probability, and Risk.

Here is the abstract:

In this article, we provide a formal logical model of evidential reasoning with proof standards and burdens of proof, which enables us to evaluate evidential reasoning by comparing stories on either side of a case. It is based on a hybrid inference model that combines argumentation and explanation, using inference to the best explanation as the central form of argument. The model is applied to one civil case and two criminal cases. It is shown to have some striking implications for modelling and using traditional proof standards like preponderance of the evidence and beyond reasonable doubt.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 1 September 2012 — has been issued for JURIX 2012: The 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 17-19 December 2012, at the University of Amsterdam, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning 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. Burkhard Schafer.

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.

Calls for Papers: Workshops @ ICAIL 2011

Calls for papers, with diverse submission deadlines, have been issued for the workshops at ICAIL 2011: The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law; the workshops are scheduled to be held 6 and 10 June 2011, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, 6 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 1 April 2011: Research papers;
• 22 April 2011: Position papers.

Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 14 March 2011.

Computational Law: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 20 April 2011.

AI & Evidential Inference, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• TBA

AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• 31 March 2011.

Coherence 2011: Artificial Intelligence, Coherence, and Judicial Reasoning, 10 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 15 April 2011: Abstracts;
• 3 June 2011: Full papers.

HT JURIX.

Zurek on Conflicts in a Legal Knowledge Base

Tomasz Zurek of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University presented a paper entitled Conflicts in Legal Knowledge Base, at LIT 2010: The 3rd Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology, held 3 May 2010, in Berlin, Germany, in conjunction with BIS 2010: The 13th International Conference on Business Information Systems. Here is the abstract of the paper:

The simulation of inference processes performed by lawyers can be seen as one way to create advisory legal system. In order to simulate such a process as accurately as possible, it is indispensable to make a clear-cut distinction between the provision itself, and its interpretation and inference mechanisms. This distinction would allow for preserving both the universal character of the provision and its applicability to various legal problems. The author’s main objective was to model a selected legal act, together with the inference rules applied, and to represent them in an advisory system, focusing on the most accurate representation of both the content and inference rules. Given that the laws which stand in contradiction prove to be the major challenge, they will constitute the primary focus of this study.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the author.

Kaptein, Prakken & Verheij: Legal Evidence and Proof: Statistics, Stories, Logic

Professor Hendrik Kaptein of Leiden University, and Professor Henry Prakken and Professor Bart Verheij, both of the University of Groningen, have published an article collection entitled Legal Evidence and Proof: Statistics, Stories, Logic (2009). Here is the abstract:

“As a result of recent scandals concerning evidence and proof in the administration of criminal justice – ranging from innocent people on death row in the United States to misuse of statistics leading to wrongful convictions in The Netherlands and elsewhere – inquiries into the logic of evidence and proof have taken on a new urgency both in an academic and practical sense.

“This study presents a broad perspective on logic by focusing on inference not just in isolation but as embedded in contexts of procedure and investigation. With special attention being paid to recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and the Law, specifically related to evidentiary reasoning, this book provides clarification of problems of logic and argumentation in relation to evidence and proof.

“As the vast majority of legal conflicts relate to contested facts, rather than contested law, this volume concerning facts as prime determinants of legal decisions presents an important contribution to the field for both scholars and practitioners.”

Here is the table of contents:

• Burdens of evidence and proof: why bear them? A plea for principled opportunism in (leaving) legal fact-finding (alone), Hendrik Kaptein;
• The fabrication of facts: the lure of the credible coincidence, Ton Derksen and Monica Meijsing;
• Decision-making in the forensic arena, Ton Broeders;
• Analysing stories using schemes, Floris Bex;
• The evaluation of evidence: differences between legal systems, Marijke Malsch and Ian Freckelton;
• Inference to the best legal explanation, Amalia Amaya;
• Accepting the truth of a story about the facts of a criminal case, Bart Verheij and Floris Bex;
• Rigid anarchic principles of evidence and proof: anomist panaceas against legal pathologies of proceduralism, Hendrik Kaptein;
• A logical analysis of burdens of proof, Henry Prakken and Giovanni Sartor;
• 12 angry men or one good woman? Asymmetric relations in evidentiary reasoning, Burkhard Schafer.

Professor Douglas Walton of the University of Windsor Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric has published a review of this book, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence & Law.

Forum on Proof and Truth in the Law at UNAM

The Cuarto Foro Sobre Epistemología Jurídica = Mini-Foro on Proof and Truth in the Law, is being held on September 4-5, 2009, in Mexico City, at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas (IIFs) = Institute for Philosophical Research, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM). Here is the program:

• Prof. Erik Lillquist, Seton Hall University School of Law, Inferences from Silence;
• Prof. Rick Lippke, Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Criminal Justice, Plea Bargained Truths, Half-Truths, and Outright Distortions;
• Prof. Dale Nance, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Truth, Trials, and Side-Constraints;
• Prof. Michael Risinger, Seton Hall University School of Law, Tragic Consequences of Deadly Dilemmas: A Response to Allen and Laudan;
• Prof. Ron Allen, Northwestern University School of Law, The Problematics of Regulating Inference;
• Prof. Larry Laudan, Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, Taking the Ratio of Differences Seriously: The Standard of Proof and the Serial Offender;
• Dr. Harry Saunders, Decision Processes Inc., Quantifying Reasonable Doubt;
• Prof. Michael Pardo, University of Alabama School of Law, Knowledge, Epistemic Justification, and Legal Proof;
• Dr. Amalia Amaya, Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, Virtues in Jury Decision-Making;
• Prof. Fred Schauer, University of Virginia School of Law, Can Bad Science Be Good Evidence? Lie-Detection, Neuroscience, and The Mistaken Conflation of Legal and Scientific Norms;
• Prof. Jordi Ferrer, Universitat de Girona, Facultat de Dret, Legal Proof and Legal Truth: Bentham Revisited?

Sartor on Legal Concepts as Inferential Nodes & Ontological Categories

Dr. Giovanni Sartor of the European University Institute Department of Law has published Legal Concepts as Inferential Nodes & Ontological Categories in the September 2009 issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law. Earlier versions of this article are available on SSRN here and here. Here is the abstract:

“I shall compare two views of legal concepts: as nodes in inferential nets and as categories in an ontology (a conceptual architecture). Firstly, I shall introduce the inferential approach, consider its implications, and distinguish the mere possession of an inferentially defined concept from the belief in the concept’s applicability, which also involves the acceptance of the concept’s constitutive inferences. For making this distinction, the inferential and eliminative analysis of legal concepts proposed by Alf Ross will be connected to the views on theoretical concepts in science advanced by Frank Ramsey and Rudolf Carnap. Consequently, the mere comprehension of a legal concept will be distinguished from the application of the concept to a particular legal system, since application presupposes a doctrinal commitment, namely, the belief that the inferences constituting the concept hold in that system. Then, I shall consider how concepts can be characterised by defining the corresponding terms and placing them within an ontology. Finally, I shall argue that there is a tension between the inferential and the ontological approach, but that both need to be taken into account, to capture the meaning and the cognitive function of legal concepts.”