Applied legal epistemology: building a knowlwdgw-based of the legal domain

+232hlm.;24c

Legitimacy and the virtualization of dispute resolution

For any type of institutionalized dispute resolution, legitimacy is a crucial characteristic, as legitimate dispute resolution promotes, for instance, general trust in state institutions and participation in economic activity. A lack of legitimacy will prevent the acceptance of dispute resolution, and thereby its use. Although many textbook definitions limit the meaning of legitimacy to legality, in its every-day use legitimacy is in fact a much broader concept. It encompasses different criteria relating to the nature of dispute resolution: is a form of dispute resolution properly embedded in a reliable institutional environment?, and: are its outcomes properly underpinned? Virtualization concerns the ways in which information and communication technologies affect administration, communication, accessibility and assessment. As an example of virtualization in dispute resolution, a scenario about on-line feedback is scrutinized. This scenario comprises the implementation of a feedback system to enable participants in an instance of dispute resolution to comment on various aspects of the dispute resolving process.

Explaining the Relevance of Court Decisions to Laymen

In the context of intelligent disclosure of case law, we report on our findings with respect to the presentation of relevant court decisions back to the laymen users. For this presentation we first localize the relevant legal concepts in the cases using shallow NLP techniques. Hereafter we investigated the use of techniques from the field of recommender systems, i.e. keyword style explanation and influence style explanation, to present the cases to the user in an understandable way. In order to find out if we succeeded in that respect, we conducted a small user satisfaction research. It shows promising results, and gives us some directions for future research

Semantic access to multilingual legal information

Today, search engines for legal information retrieval do not include legal knowledge into their search strategies. Thes