An Actual Application of an Analogical Legal Reasoning System Dependent on Legal Purposes Abstract

We have already developed a legal reasoning system by analogy based on a framework, called Goal-Dependent Abstraction (GDA), to detect similarities dependent on given goals. According to the framework, two legal concepts are regarded as similar ones, provided they share the same explanation of a legal purpose as the goal to be explained. Consequently, we can automatically capture similarities between the premises of legal rules and cases in inquiry, depending on the purposes of legal rules. In this article, we further show that this approach works well in an actual case for which Japanese Supreme Court has analogically applied the Article 93 of the Civil Code of Japan, which prescribes mental reservations, to an act as an agent. Furthermore, to illustrate our reasoning procedure, we also demonstrate the overview and GUI of our legal reasoning system adopting an object-oriented logic programming language to describe legal knowledge.

Conceptual Classification Based on Abstractions

This paper describes a conceptual scheme for classifying conceptual situations from the viewpoint of similarities under a goal concept. As the similarity notion depends on a context, we use a goal concept to specify it. Each situation and the goal is represented as a concept graph from which an explanation of the goal is extracted using a typed domain theory. A notion of abstractions is then used to define what is a valid similarity with respect to the explanation of goal. In a word, given an initial situation and a goal subsuming it, a situation is similar to the initial situation if it is a specialization of some analogue of the initial one. We observe that generalization is also needed to obtain a non-trivial or useful similarity. Based on this observation, we present an experimental result on a system for finding similarities between situations under a goal concept