Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles (respectively, κ=0.65 and κ=0.95 for inter- and intra-annotator agreement). We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall κ of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard

The Aberdeen Burgh Records of 1398-1531 and the Semantic Web

This paper provides an overview of two text analytic projects on the Aberdeen burgh records, which are legal records of the city of Aberdeen, Scotland. These records contain detailed information about a range of activities in the city and their legal treatment. The projects cover the periods 1398-1511 (Law in the Aberdeen Council Registers project - LACR) and 1530-1531 (A Text Analytic Approach to Rural and Urban Legal Histories project - TAHL). The completed TAHL project annotated a selected corpus with rich semantic information for the purpose of facilitating historical research by querying and extracting data from across the corpus. The LACR project, which is ongoing, focuses on transcribing the first eight volumes of the Aberdeen burgh records (1398-1511) into the Text Encoding Initiative's standard, thus making the text machinereadable. This project lays the foundation for further analysis and enrichment of the corpus

Comparative Contract Law: Methodologically Human or Artificially Intelligent?

本稿は、「法科学の進歩と法政策の構築において、コンピューターと人工知能にどれくらい深く依存すべきか」という今日の法学者が直面しているもっとも重要な問題の一つを取り上げる。 今日に法と呼ばれているものを発展させるための数千年にわたる長い挑戦は、我々の根本規範と道徳的価値に対する創造的、文化的、不可避の質問を含む生得的で人間的な作業であった。契約法の比較法的観点から、人が作った法とは、2000 年以上にわたって文書化され、法的進化による包括的な概念を導出し、各文化に当てはまる法の概念および社会福祉における大きな公平性と効率性を図るために絶えず変化してきた。 本稿は、各地域社会と国の秩序と正義についての人文学的表現としての法、特に契約法において、その歴史が様々な文化や時代においてどのように共通するかを見つける。また、ドーマ、パスカルおよびライプニッツの研究方法からすでに数学的研究方法の起源が存在したことを発見し、法が「科学がもつ形式的な言語」を同様に有することができるかについて探究する。これは、人工知能システムが契約法の比較法的研究の方法論として全面的に活用する ことができるかについての検討につながる。この検討を通じて、コンピュター基盤の方法論から発生しうる問題点を指摘し、やはり法律家が主導的に形式的な言語を考慮しながら新たな技術を開発することにより、法の正義と公平に関する人文学的思考を反映し、その利益を享有できると主張する。Prof. Dr. Roy Andrew Partain による本講演は、2019年11月21日（木）に広島大学法学部・経済学部B255室において、広島大学法学部法学会の主催により実施された

Legal regulation of internal party democracy in Nigeria

The lack of internal democracy in many political parties in Nigeria has created a general loss of confidence in voters toward the electoral process and democratic consolidation. This paper examines the extent to which political parties have adhered to or deviated from the relevant Constitutional and electoral law provisions in Nigeria toward achieving internal democracy and how this has affected voters' attitudes and confidence in the electoral process and Nigerian democracy generally. To achieve this objective, the researchers utilize the doctrinal research method in examining the relevant provisions of the 1999 Constitution on internal party democracy, the relevant Electoral laws, and judicial decisions. During the work, it is observed that political party leadership in Nigeria rarely heed the relevant constitutional provisions and laws on internal party affairs. The paper finds that judicial decisions concerning this issue have not followed a similar pattern, which has greatly eroded voters' confidence. It recommended a compelling need for the judiciary to follow legally valid precedents established in earlier judgments in deciding new cases arising from intra-party affairs, especially concerning the substitution of candidates

A model for predicting court decisions on child custody

Awarding joint or sole custody is of crucial importance for the lives of both the child and the parents. This paper first models the factors explaining a court''s decision to grant child custody and later tests the predictive capacity of the proposed model. We conducted an empirical study using data from 1, 884 court rulings, identifying and labeling factual elements, legal principles, and other relevant information. We developed a neural network model that includes eight factual findings, such as the relationship between the parents and their economic resources, the child''s opinion, and the psychological report on the type of custody. We performed a temporal validation using cases later in time than those in the training sample for prediction. Our system predicted the court''s decisions with an accuracy exceeding 85%. We obtained easy-to-apply decision rules with the decision tree technique. The paper contributes by identifying the factors that best predict joint custody, which is useful for parents, lawyers, and prosecutors. Parents would do well to know these findings before venturing into a courtroom

Beyond the chinese room. Appunti per una riflessione su intelligenza artificiale e diritto pubblico

L’intelligenza artificiale (AI) è un concetto discusso e la stessa idea che le macchine possano pensare è controversa. L’articolo – pur dandone conto brevemente – rinuncia ad entrare nella discussione di questa categoria di problemi. Piuttosto, sia sulla base della letteratura scientifica che delle informazioni che si traggono da quella giuridica e dalla prassi, pone il problema della sostituzione di lavoro legale svolto da esseri umani con macchine intelligenti. Il processo è già ampiamente in atto senza che sia sufficientemente avvertito culturalmente. Infatti, sono disponibili macchine intelligenti in grado di costruire rassegne di giurisprudenza legislazione e dottrina, di comporre atti legali semplici (soprattutto atti di citazione), dichiarazioni fiscali, bilanci, atti societari, di svolgere ricerche legali o di sostituire docenti.  La questione che si affronta è che ciò accade senza che i problemi teorici siano stati risolti, sicché in grande parte in modo culturalmente incontrollato. L’articolo, quindi, pone alcuni problemi specifici del diritto pubblico. In particolare: (i) essendo controversi molti concetti base del diritto pubblico, non appare neutrale la scelta di repertoriazione delle informazioni; si tratta di un processo che probabilmente aiuta una permanenza delle versioni tradizionali e consolidate dei concetti e rischia di far perdere i profili evolutivi, così come rendere più ardua l’affermazione (o anche la stessa elaborazione) di idee nuove; (ii) l’efficienza dell’amministrazione che deriva dall’AI, poi, rischia non solo di ridurre la spinta verso la liberalizzazione di settori di attività (stante che cosa meno provvedere con atti di autorità), quanto – più ancora – di provocare normalizzazione dei comportamenti, stante che diventerà sempre più arduo sostenere il comportamento originale lecito rispetto a quello standardizzato; (iii) lo stesso processo ne viene influenzato, quanto meno lungo il profilo dell’istruttoria; (iv) infine, l’abitudine ad esprimersi lungo alternative automatizzate, potrebbe influenzare gli stessi meccanismi democratici. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a controversial idea and the paper renounce to define the concept, nether is aimed to resolve theoretical problems such as: are machines able to think or AI may substitute human brain in legal interpretation. Referring to scientific debate on AI, the paper try to summarize AI achievements and, collecting information in legal literature, AI actual application to legal works. Under this premises, the paper is aimed to raise the problem of a “whatever works” approach to AI’s application to legal works. As a matter of fact, machines for legal research, legal learning, drafting of accounting documents or tax declarations or simple writ of summons, searching of precedents, legislation or creation of case-law overview, are available.It appears clear that such kind of AI systems are available and of everyday use. Nonetheless, theoretical problems remain unsolved, therefore the scheme of such systems are uncontrolled. Just to give an example, use of analogy is a basic system for AI; unfortunately, in legal reasoning, analogy may extend public powers besides what is legitimate under the Rule of Law. Paper indicate a certain number of problem for public law: (i) firstly, principles, rules, concepts of general use, in public law are often controversial and discussed, therefore choices about references and mapping are not neutral; new interpretation or doctrine success will depend on this in not insignificant measure; (ii) efficiency required in recent years a deep standardization of cases, with the result of a normalization process, weaker protection of minorities or dissenting habits, freezing of liberalization - being easier a public decision, its social and economic cost will reduce; (iii) in litigation, is to be better understood the possible effects of AI collecting and examination of evidence, both during the administrative procedure and process in court; (iv) lately, dissemination of automated choices in all day life, may influence election systems and voter’s independence. PAROLE CHIAVE: intelligenza artificiale, test di Turing, repertoriazione delle informazioni, stanza cinese, biopoliticaKEYWORDS: artificial intelligence, Turing’s test, find information, the Chinese Room, biopolitic