Syllabus: Seminar on Artificial Intelligence and Law
January 7, 2000

Kevin D. Ashley, School of Law and Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems, University of Pittsburgh

Time and Place: Spring Semester, 2000: Tuesdays, 4:00 - 5:50 PM, Law Bldg 118

Professor: Kevin D. Ashley
Law Bldg, 3900 Forbes Ave., Room 317, 648-1495
Learning Research and Development Center, 3939 O'Hara St., Room 519, 624-7496

Materials: Readings available from Copy Cat.

Evaluation and Requirements:

The two major requirements are a seminar paper and classroom participation.

Seminar papers: Students should contact Prof. Ashley early in the term to discuss appropriate paper topics. This is especially true for those who intend the paper to satisfy their law school writing requirement. A typical paper topic for a law student might involve the student’s attempting to model how a lawyer reasons about an interesting legal issue or task using one or more of the AI techniques discussed in the seminar. Such a paper would identify the information necessary to reason about the issue or perform the task, describe a scheme for representing the information and a mechanism for applying it to solve problems, work through examples manually illustrating how the mechanism works, and discuss the difficulties encountered and assumptions made. Graduate students are invited to propose paper topics connecting the seminar material to their own interests in AI.

In lieu of a seminar paper, students with programming experience, access to computer equipment and software, and approval of Prof. Ashley, may attempt to design and build an AI program for a legal application

Classroom Participation: Students will also be evaluated on the basis of class participation. To stimulate class participation and foster understanding of the readings, students will be asked to prepare short summaries (1 - 2 pages) of many of the readings. These summaries will be collected on the day the reading is to be discussed. Prof. Ashley may assign individual students responsibility for being prepared to discuss individual readings.

Schedule of Topics and Readings:

I. Introduction to the course
Date: January 11

Begin readings for January 18 and 25.


II. Overview of AI and Law Research
Date: January 18

             Tutorial Presentation entitled "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Law" by Prof. Ashley

Buchanan & Headrick. "Some Speculation about Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning". 23 Stanford L. R. 40-62 (1970).
Edwina L. Rissland. "Artificial Intelligence and Law: Stepping Stones to a Model of Legal Reasoning". 99 Yale L.J. 1957-1981. June 1990. Number 8.
III. What is Legal Reasoning? What is AI?
Date: January 25

             Tutorial Presentation entitled "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Law" by Prof. Ashley (cont.)

Edward H. Levi. An Introduction to Legal Reasoning. pp. 1-27. University of Chicago Press, 1949.

On reserve: K. N. Llewellyn. The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study. pp. 19-76. Oceana Publications, Dobbs Ferry, NY, 1960 edition, 1930.

On reserve: Edwina L. Rissland. "Artificial Intelligence: Knowledge Representation", "Artificial Intelligence: Search, Control and Learning". Chapter 4 and 5 of Cognitive Science, an Introduction. 2d Edition. pp. 139-214. Bradford Books / MIT Press. 1985. Cambridge, MA.

IV. Legal Production Rule Systems
Date: February 1
D. A. Waterman and M. Peterson. Models of Legal Decisionmaking. Technical Report R-2717-1CJ. pp. v-xii, 1-55. Rand Corporation. Santa Monica, CA. 1981.
V. Problems with Logical Representations of Statutes
Date: February 8 M. J. Sergot, F. Sadri, R. A. Kowalski, F. Kriwaczek, P. Hammond, and H. T. Cory. "The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program". Communications of the ACM, 29(5):370--386, May 1986.   Layman E. Allen and C. R. Engholm. "Normalized Legal Drafting and the Query Method". 29 Journal of Legal Education 380-412. 1978.   Layman E. Allen and Charles S. Saxon. "Some Problems in Designing Expert Systems to Aid Legal Reasoning". In Proceedings of First International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pp. 94-103. Northeastern University, Boston, 1987.   Donald Berman and Carole Hafner. "Obstacles to the Development of Logic-Based Models of Legal Reasoning" in Computer Power and Legal Language. Walter, C. (ed.) pp. 183-214. Greenwood Press. 1986. VI. Identifying Legal Issues
Dates: February 15
Anne. vdL. Gardner. An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning. pp. 1-16, 119-188. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1987.
VII. Representing Legal Concepts
Dates: February 22
L. Thorne McCarty and N. S. Sridharan. "A Computational Theory of Legal Argument". LRP-TR-13. pp. 1-36. Laboratory for Computer Science Research. Rutgers University. New Brunswick, NJ, 1982

D. Schlobohm and L. T. McCarty. "EPS II: Estate Planning with Prototypes" 1989 In Proceedings of Second International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pp. 1-10. New York: Association of Computing Machinery

VIII. Arguing with Cases and Hypotheticals
Dates: February 29
Kevin D. Ashley. Modeling Legal Argument: Reasoning with Cases and Hypotheticals. The MIT Press / Bradford Books, 1990. Book pp. 9-86, 184-193
IX. Structured Legal Analogies
Date: March 14
L. Karl Branting, "Building Explanations from Rules and Structured Cases". International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34(6):797--837,1991.
X. Integrating Cases, Statutes, and Rules
Date: March 21
Edwina L. Rissland and David B. Skalak "CABARET: Statutory Interpretation in a Hybrid Architecture" in International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34(6):839--887,1991.

E. Rissland, D. Skalak, and M. Friedman. 1993 "BankXX: A Program to Generate Argument through Case-Base Search" in Proceedings of Fourth International Conference on AI and Law. pp. 117-124.

Henry Prakken and G. Sartor, 1997 "Reasoning with Precedents in a Dialogue Game" in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. pp. 1-9. Association for Computing Machinery. New York. July.

John F. Horty (1999) "Precedent, Deontic Logic, and Inheritance" in Proceedings, Seventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pp. 63-71. Association of Computing Machinery, New York. Oslo. June.

XI. Teleology; Case Interpretation (& Intelligent Tutoring)
Date: March 28
Donald H. Berman and C. Hafner (1993) "Representing Teleological Structure in Case-Based Legal Reasoning: The Missing Link" in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. pp. 50-59. Association for Computing Machinery. New York. June.

L. Karl Branting (1993) "A Reduction-Graph Model of Ratio Decidendi" in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. pp. 40-49. Association for Computing Machinery. New York. June.

Aleven, V. and K. Ashley. (1997) "Evaluating a Learning Environment for Case-Based Argumentation Skills". International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, ICAIL-97. Melbourne, Australia. June. pp. 170-179. Association for Computing Machinery: NY, NY.

Ashley, K. and V. Aleven. (1997) "Reasoning Symbolically About Partially Matched Cases". International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-97. Nagoya, Japan. August. pp. 335-341. Morgan Kaufmann: San Francisco.

XII. Text Retrieval
Dates: April 4
David C. Blair and M. E. Maron. "An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness for a Full-Text Document-Retrieval System". Communications of the ACM, 28(3):289-299, March 1985.
Howard R. Turtle. 1995 "Text Retrieval in the Legal World" in Artificial Intelligence and Law, 3: 5-54. Kluwer: Dordrect, The Netherlands.

Daniels, J.J. and Rissland, E.L.(1997) Finding Legally Relevant Passages in Case Opinions. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. ICAIL-97 pp. 39-46. Association for Computing Machinery. New York.

Bruninghaus, S. and Ashley, K.D. (1999). "Toward Adding Knowledge to Learning Algorithms for Indexing Legal Cases," in Proceedings, Seventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pp. 9-17. Association of Computing Machinery, New York. Oslo. June.

X. Helping Judges: Document Drafting, Decision Making, Sentencing
Dates: April 11
J. Karl Branting, J. Lester, and C. Callaway (1997), "Automated Drafting of Self-Explaining Documents," Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pp. 72-81, ACM Press, New York

John Zeleznikow and A. Stranieri, 1995 "The Split-Up System: Integrating Neural Networks and Rule-Based Reasoning in the Legal Domain" in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. pp. 185-194. Association for Computing Machinery. New York. May.

Uri Schild, 1995 "Intelligent Computer Systems for Criminal Sentencing" in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. pp. 229-238. Association for Computing Machinery. New York. May.

XIII. Hybrids, Hypertext and Beyond
Dates: April 18
Daniel E. Rose and R. K. Belew, "A Connectionist and Symbolic Hybrid for Improving Legal Research". International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 35: 1-33, 1991.

Graham Greenleaf, A. Mowbray, Geoffrey King, Simon Cant, and Philip Chung (1997),  "More Than Wyshful Thinking:  AustLii's Legal Inferencing via the World Wide Web ," Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pp. 47-55, ACM Press, New York

Edwina L. Rissland and M. Timur. Friedman, 1995 "Detecting Change in Legal Concepts" in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. pp. 127-136. Association for Computing Machinery. New York. May.