Extended to 11 November 2011: Call for Papers: JURIX Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law

A call for papers — with extended submission deadline of 11 November 2011 — has been issued for the JURIX 2011 Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law, to be held 14 December 2011, in Vienna, Austria.

The workshop is being held in connection with JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Papers for the Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law are invited on the following topics:

• [...] legal rules or norms,
• legal validity,
• formation of law,
• hierarchy in legal systems,
• the basic norm and rule of recognition,
• rights and duties,
• permissions, obligations and prohibitions, [...]
• states and legal persons[,]
• [d]eductive, abductive and inductive reasoning in law,
• multi-layered reasoning,
• systematization and/or axiomatization of law[,] and
• critical perspectives on fundamental legal concepts and systematization of law.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Anne Gardner.

Call for Papers: JURIX Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law

A call for papers — with extended submission deadline of 11 November 2011 28 October 2011 — has been issued for the JURIX 2011 Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law, to be held 14 December 2011, in Vienna, Austria.

The workshop is being held in connection with JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Papers for the Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law are invited on the following topics:

• [...] legal rules or norms,
• legal validity,
• formation of law,
• hierarchy in legal systems,
• the basic norm and rule of recognition,
• rights and duties,
• permissions, obligations and prohibitions, [...]
• states and legal persons[,]
• [d]eductive, abductive and inductive reasoning in law,
• multi-layered reasoning,
• systematization and/or axiomatization of law[,] and
• critical perspectives on fundamental legal concepts and systematization of law.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Anne Gardner.

[Revised on 29 October 2011 to reflect extended deadline.]

Park et al. on Bayes’s Theorem and the Federal Rules of Evidence

Professor Roger C. Park of the University of California Hastings College of Law, and colleagues, have published Bayes Wars Redivivus — An Exchange, International Commentary on Evidence, v. 8, no. 1, article 1 (2010). Here is the abstract:

An electronic exchange among 10 evidence scholars that began with a discussion of the restyled Federal Rules and grew into a significant restatement of debates in evidentiary scholarship over the last 50 years, touching on relevance, probative value, inference, Bayesianism and the foundations of evidence, with an introduction by Michael Risinger.

Here are excerpts from the introduction:

Attempts to domesticate both formal symbolic notation and probability theory to the description of legal proof have a long history. Until fairly recently, however, such attempts as were made can be regarded as significantly off the main intellectual track for the bulk of theorists and academic commentators, to say nothing of judges and practitioners. Things began to change significantly in 1968 with the publication of John Kaplan’s watershed article invoking the economics model and management tool called decision theory as a possible model for legal evidence and inference.

This article was followed in fairly short order by Finkelstein and Fairley, and by Laurence Tribe’s cautionary rejoinder, which set the pot bubbling for a generation of then-young evidence scholars. The implications (vel non) of Bayes’ theorem and of the asserted differences between “objective” and “subjective” probabilities for the theory of evidence and inference in legal proceedings became the dominant theme of nearly two decades of legal scholarship from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s, much of the later work dealing with the tensions between the formal Bayesian accounts and the power of the emerging “story model” of human information processing, and with such vexed notions as “conditional relevance.”

For more than a decade now, those fights have subsided, not because of the emergence of a synthetic consensus, but because other perhaps more immediately pressing issues have seized the focus of the academy, such things as the nature and control of asserted expertise in the courtroom, and confrontation after Crawford. …[L]ast summer, on a listserv restricted to academics in evidence, a seemingly innocuous thread concerning the anticipated effects of the “restyled” versions of the Federal Rules of Evidence morphed into a full-throated exchange concerning the very foundations of the concepts of evidence, inference and relevance itself, featuring some of the established voices from the height of the “Bayes Wars,” and some significant new ones to boot. All in all, it was just too good to let it languish as a bygone thread on a restricted listserv, so we have, with the permission of all involved, lightly edited the exchanges, and present them here. … [footnotes omitted]

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.

Gordon & Walton on Proof Burdens and Standards

Prof. Dr. Thomas F. Gordon of Fraunhofer FOKUS and the Universität Potsdam Institute of Computer Science and Professor Douglas Walton of the University of Windsor Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric have published Proof Burdens and Standards, in Iyad Rahwan and Guillermo R. Simari, editors, Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence, pages 239-258 (2009). Here is the abstract:

This chapter explains the role of proof burdens and standards in argumentation, illustrates them using legal procedures, and surveys the history of research on computational models of these concepts. It also presents an original computational model which aims to integrate the features of these prior systems.

Gordon, Juristische Argumentation als Modellierungsprozess

Prof. Dr. Thomas F. Gordon of Fraunhofer FOKUS and the Universität Potsdam Institute of Computer Science has published Juristische Argumentation als Modellierungsprozess, in Roland Traunmüller and Maria Wimmer, editors, Informatik in Recht und Verwaltung: Gestern – Heute – Morgen: Ehrenband Prof. Dr. Dr. Herbert Fiedler zum Achtzigsten Geburtstag, Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), pages 104–112 (2010). Here is the abstract:

Fiedlers Vorstellung von juristischem Schließen war der Beginn für eine Reihe von Arbeiten auf dem Gebiet der Künstlichen Intelligenz und Recht an Computermodellen für juristische Argumentation. Dieser Aufsatz stellt die Entstehung der konstruktiven Sicht auf die juristische Argumentation kurz dar und fasst meine Arbeit in dieser Tradition zusammen, in der juristisches Schließen als ein Prozess des dialogischen Argumentierens angesehen wird, während dem Theorien und Beweise auf der Basis von Interpretationen von Beweisen (“evidence”) und juristischen Quellen konstruiert werden.

Van den Braak on Sensemaking Software for Crime Analysis

Dr. Susan van den Braak has published her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Sensemaking Software for Crime Analysis (2010).

Dr. van den Braak will defend this dissertation on 15 March 2010 at Senaatszaal van het Academiegebouw, Universiteit Utrecht, Domplein 29, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Here is the abstract:

Criminal investigation is a difficult and laborious process that is prone to error as teams of investigators may be subject to tunnel vision, groupthink, and confirmation bias. As a result, miscarriages of justice may ensue. To overcome these problems, in the Dutch law enforcement organization, crime analysts have been given a more important role. It is now their task to critically evaluate the investigation that is going on. They have to make sense of the vast amount of evidence available in a case by generating plausible scenarios about what might have happened. Subsequently, they have to assess the quality of their scenarios and choose the best alternative. Due to the difficulty of this process, a great need exists for software that supports crime analysts in their task. However, current support tools for crime analysis do not allow analysts to record scenarios and their relation to the evidence and as a result the most important part of the analysis process remains in the analysts’ minds. Therefore, they may benefit from so-called sensemaking systems that allow them to make their reasoning process explicit by visualizing scenarios and the reasons why these scenarios are supported by the evidence. Nevertheless, such sensemaking tools for crime analysis are relatively sparse and often do not incorporate a logical model of reasoning with evidence in the context of crime analysis. This thesis aims to fill this gap by proposing sensemaking software that has specifically been designed for crime analysis. Such a tool should be rationally well-founded, natural, useful, usable, and effective. To this aid, a proof-of-concept application called AVERs (Argument Visualization for Evidential Reasoning based on stories) was built that implements a rationally well-founded and natural model of the reasoning that takes place in crime analysis. In this way a standard of rational reasoning is encouraged and errors may be reduced. Using AVERs analysts are able to create visual representations of scenarios and evidential arguments. Scenarios are represented as causal networks of events, while evidential arguments are arguments based on the evidential data in the case. Such arguments are based on argumentation schemes that often come with critical questions. These questions make the analysts more aware of possible sources of doubt and encourage them to critically examine the evidence. Evidential arguments can be used to support or attack scenarios with the available evidence. In this way, this software allows the analysts to reason about scenarios and to critically evaluate them. Moreover, it provides features that can be used to compare alternative scenarios. A series of empirical studies has confirmed that the design and implementation of AVERs fulfills all five criteria to a certain degree. This means that it is useful to crime analysts and satisfies their desires, while it may improve their analysis of the case and the communication of their results to the investigators working on the case, and ensures that rational analyses are performed. Therefore, through this software in the future biases in the crime analysis process may be avoided.

Wyner on The ESTRELLA Project

An overview of The ESTRELLA Project (The European project for Standardized Transparent Representations in order to Extend Legal Accessibility), a major legal informatics project based at the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law, and intended to create standards for European legal information systems, has been posted by Dr. Adam Wyner.

The post contains excerpts from the 2008 ESTRELLA User Report.

Dr. Wyner describes the main components of the project:

• The Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), a legal knowledge representation system, which “provides formalisms for representing concepts (‘ontologies’), inference rules, precedent cases and arguments”;
• The LKIF Core Ontology, a high-level general ontology for law; and
• MetaLex, an XML schema for legislation.

For more information, please see the entire post.

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.

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.