PriCL: Creating a Precedent A Framework for Reasoning about Privacy Case Law

We introduce PriCL: the first framework for expressing and automatically reasoning about privacy case law by means of precedent. PriCL is parametric in an underlying logic for expressing world properties, and provides support for court decisions, their justification, the circumstances in which the justification applies as well as court hierarchies. Moreover, the framework offers a tight connection between privacy case law and the notion of norms that underlies existing rule-based privacy research. In terms of automation, we identify the major reasoning tasks for privacy cases such as deducing legal permissions or extracting norms. For solving these tasks, we provide generic algorithms that have particularly efficient realizations within an expressive underlying logic. Finally, we derive a definition of deducibility based on legal concepts and subsequently propose an equivalent characterization in terms of logic satisfiability.Comment: Extended versio

Case-based reasoning with precedent models: Preliminary report

Formalizing case-based reasoning is an important topic in AI and Law, which has been discussed using various approaches, such as formal dialogue games, abstract dialectical frameworks. In this paper we model case-based reasoning by using the formal argument semantics of case models. With the precedent models we present, the validity of legal arguments in the case-based reasoning process can be shown formally. We also present a case study of precedent models in a real legal domain and evaluate the validity of arguments in case-based reasoning

A Logic for Statutes

Case-based reasoning is, without question, a puzzle. When students are taught to “think like lawyers” in their first year of law school, they are taught case-based common-law reasoning. Books on legal reasoning are devoted almost entirely to the topic. How do courts reason from one case to the next? Is case-based reasoning reasoning from analogy? How should case-based reasoning be modeled? How can it be justified? In contrast, rule-based legal reasoning (as exemplified in much statutory reasoning) is taken as simple in legal scholarship. Statutory interpretation—how to determine the meaning of words in a statute, the relevance of the lawmakers’ intent, and so forth—is much discussed, but there is little treatment of the structure of statutory reasoning once the meaning of the words is established. Once the meaning of terms is established, statutory reasoning is considered, roughly speaking, to be deductive reasoning. This Essay examines the structure of statutory reasoning after ambiguities are resolved and the meaning of the statute’s terms established. It argues that standard formal logic is not the best approach for modeling statutory rule-based reasoning. Rather, the Essay argues, using the Internal Revenue Code and accompanying regulations, judicial decisions, and rulings as its primary example, that at least some statutory reasoning is best characterized as defeasible reasoning—reasoning that may result in conclusions that can be defeated by subsequent information—and is best modeled using default logic. The Essay then addresses the practical and theoretical benefits of this alternative understanding of rule-based legal reasoning

The Future of Electioneering in Wyoming

Wyoming\u27s electioneering law is among the most expansive in the country. In this article, Alex Beezley examines a recently filed lawsuit challenging the law and predicts how the court will decide the case based on the Supreme Court\u27s reasoning in Burson v. Freeman.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1041/thumbnail.jp

Constitutional Law and Precedent

This collection examines case-based reasoning in constitutional adjudication; that is, how courts decide on constitutional cases by referring to their own prior case law and the case law of other national, foreign, and international courts. Argumentation based on judicial authority is now fundamental to the resolution of constitutional disputes. At the same time, it is the most common form of reasoning used by courts. This volume shows not only the strengths and weaknesses of such argumentation, but also its serious methodological shortcomings. The book is comparative in nature, with individual chapters examining similar problems that different courts have resolved in different ways. The research covers three types of courts; namely the civil law constitutional courts of Germany, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary; the common law supreme courts of the United States, Canada, and Australia; and the European international courts represented by the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union. The authors are distinguished scholars from various countries who specialise in constitutional justice issues. This book will be of interest to legal theorists and practitioners, and will be especially insightful for constitutional court judges

From Langdell to Law and Economics: Two Conceptions of Stare Decisis in Contract Law

In his classic monograph, The Death of Contract, Grant Gilmore argued that Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Samuel Williston trumped up the legal credentials for their classical bargain theory of contract law. Gilmore\u27s analysis has been subjected to extensive criticism, but its specific, sustained, and fundamental charge that the bargain theory was based on a fraudulent misrepresentation of precedential authority has never been questioned. In this Essay, I argue that Gilmore\u27s case against the classical theorists rests on the suppressed premise that the precedential authority of cases resides in the express judicial reasoning used to decide them. In contrast, I argue that the classical theorists implicitly presuppose that the precedential authority of cases consists in the best theory that explains their outcomes, even if that theory is inconsistent with the case\u27s express judicial reasoning. The classical view of precedential authority completely defuses Gilmore\u27s charge of fraud. In Gilmore\u27s view, merely demonstrating the inconsistency between the proposition for which the classical theorists cited a case and the express reasoning in that case suffices as proof of misrepresentation. But in the classical theorists\u27 view, the express reasoning in a case is simply a theory of its precedential authority, which, like any theory, can be wrong. Thus, the classical theorists simply reject Gilmore\u27s claim that a case cannot properly be cited for a proposition inconsistent with its express reasoning. The real dispute, then, between Gilmore and the classical theorists is over the nature of precedential authority and not the content of contract law

Teaching Law and Digital Age Legal Practice with an AI and Law Seminar

This article provides a guide and examples for using a seminar on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law to teach lessons about legal reasoning and about legal practice in the digital age. Artificial Intelligence and Law is a subfield of AI/ computer science research that focuses on computationally modeling legal reasoning. In at least a few law schools, the AI and Law seminar has regularly taught students fundamental issues about law and legal reasoning by focusing them on the problems these issues pose for scientists attempting to computationally model legal reasoning. AI and Law researchers have designed programs to reason with legal rules, apply legal precedents, predict case outcomes, argue like a legal advocate and visualize legal arguments. The article illustrates some of the pedagogically important lessons that they have learned in the process. As the technology of legal practice catches up with the aspirations of AI and Law researchers, the AI and Law seminar can play a new role in legal education. With advances in such areas as e-discovery, legal information retrieval (IR), and semantic processing of web-based information for electronic contracting, the chances are increasing that, in their legal practices, law students will use, and even depend on, systems that employ AI techniques. As explained in the Article, an AI and Law seminar invites students to think about processes of legal reasoning and legal practice and about how those processes employ information. It teaches how the new digital documents technologies work, what they can and cannot do, how to measure performance, how to evaluate claims about the technologies, and how to be savvy consumers and users of the technologies