Automation of Legal Reasoning : A Study on Artificial Intelligence

"Automation of Legal Reasoning" explores the development which has lead up to the formation of a joint field of artificial intelligence (AI) and law. In this undertaking, the basic foundations of AI and the methodological approaches found in jurisprudence are related to each other in a historical perspective. The book also addresses the future prospects of the discipline. In this part of the study an elaborated jurisprudential model of legal reasoning is introduced, reflecting different sub-processes and various types of legal knowledge exercising influence over them. In addition, a critical analysis of various AI-approaches that have been suggested for the field of law is provided. In this context, also two AI-system development projects carried out at The Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute are described. The investigation leads up to the formulation of a design approach for advanced AI-systems for law, based on a functional decomposition of legal knowledge, the integration of various computational techniques and the structural integration of different types of small-scale AI-systems. The study concludes with a discussion of potentialities and consequences of a future development.