An explicit model for learning to structure and analyze decisions by judges

Legal practitioners and legal scientists need to have knowledge of the general rules that apply in the legal system. This involves both knowledge of the legislation and knowledge of the decisions by judges that function as general rules of law. Law students preparing themselves for the legal profession need to acquire these kinds of knowledge. A student has to have knowledge about where to look for decisions, understand the structure of decisions and learn to determine what makes a decision relevant to the body of applicable rules in the legal system. Legal education primarily aims at acquiring insight in the legal sources, their history and background. This basic knowledge is of great importance; legal problem solving is hardly possible without an understanding of the legal knowledge. To illustrate the use of this knowledge in practice, teachers work through decisions as examples. However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn by explanation or by imitation alone. A more effective way to obtain expertise is by actually performing the task, i.e. students should do the exercises, while the teacher provides feedback on their solutions. For effective learning, also the solution process should be monitored and provided with feedback. Furthermore it is desirable for students to be able to ask for help at any time during the process. They should also be able to practice over and over again. An ideal situation would have a teacher available for every student, monitoring the student while practicing and providing support where and whenever necessary. However, this being not practically feasible, the second best option is to offer the student electronic support. CASE (Case Analysis and Structuring Environment) is an environment where a law student can practice with finding decisions, with structuring its text and with analysing the decision in order to be able to determine in what way it adds to the body of applicable rules in the legal system. CASE is developed using a principled and structured design approach. A short description of this approach is followed by an analysis of the learning task, the difficulties law students experience and the remedies proposed on the basis of both the task analysis and the stated difficulties. This is followed by a description of architecture, functionality, platform and implementation of CASE and a description of a session with CASE and future work

Through a screen, darkly: electronic legal education in europe

Electronic legal education involves the use of information, communication and instructional technologies to enhance students' learning of the law and to provide law teachers with environments and tools for teaching the law. With the fast growth of the Internet many Law schools and Law faculties are moving their education and training into web environments. This may open new ways of teaching and learning the law by providing students with an enviroment in which they can manage legal information and legal knowledge for their personal professional use. However it is clear that throughout Europe there are divergent as well as convergent uses of the web and IT. This article explores some of the issues inherent in this, and suggests a number of projects that would enable ICT in legal education to facilitate the aims of the Sorbonne-Bologna process

Principled and Structured Design of Electronic Materials For . . .

Electronic legal education involves the use of information, communication and instructional technologies to enhance students learning of the law and to provide law teachers with environments and tools for teaching the law. Since the beginning of the Eighties these types of technologies were introduced in legal education at Law schools and faculties of Law. The first applications in this field were databanks of statutes and precedents; soon to be followed by computer assisted instructional programs. With the fast growth of the Internet many Law schools and Law faculties are moving their education and training into the web environment. The web environment enables a more integrated approach of using the technologies in legal education. It also enables teachers to assemble, store and (re) use materials for learning the law. Maybe even more important it may open new ways of teaching and learning the law, for example, by providing students with an environment in which they can manage legal information and legal knowledge for their personal professional use. Plenty of possibilities, however, to realize effective and efficient learning of the law existing electronic materials should be carefully (re)-used and integrated, where new electronic materials have to be designed. The way to realize this is by taking a principled and structured design approach. This indicates that the design of electronic materials for learning the law has to be defined as research. The research field of developing electronic materials for effectively and efficiently learning the law is still in its infancy. Main reason for this is the fact that Law schools and Law faculties approach the development of instructional materials as teaching and not as research. Another reason is that the design of electr..

Scarman House

Abstract: A theory of arificial legal reasoning is described together with the consequences the assumptions have on knowledge representation and the architecture derived from this view. Some extensions, refinements and adaptations necessary in order to be able to use the architecture to develop a system to teach legal reasoning to law students are described. The focus of the research on legal problem solving is on formulating hypotheses about modelling legal problem solving for educational purposes and testing these hypotheses in an experiment. The experiment is the development of an intelligent tutoring system to train law students to solve problems in administrative procedural law

Legal Knowledge Based Systems

This research aims at providing a solution for problems experienced by law students when solving legal cases. We propose a computer coach for training legal-case solving, the ROSA system. The basis for ROSA is an explicit, teachable and learnable model of legalcase solving, executable by machines and by humans