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Hunter, Daniel --- "Recent US Computer Copyright Cases and the Australian Law - The Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law" [1994] JlLawInfoSci 9; (1994) 5(1) Journal of Law, Information and Science 114

Recent US Computer Copyright Cases and the Australian Law
The Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

DANIEL HUNTER[1]

1. Introduction

In volume 2, number 2 of this journal, Dave Brown reported on the Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL). In his report and in an article in that edition, Dave Brown and Bob Moles aired the sceptics' view of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law. Indeed, those papers set off a debate in the pages of this journal which has only just died down.[2] My view of AI and Law is perhaps more forgiving than theirs and so this report of the fourth conference is like a form of reply by one of the proselytising minority who are not worried by AI and Law. Nonetheless I, like Dave, have some concerns about this conference's themes and having gone back to his earlier comments find myself in some agreement. But I will explain this later. First, I will outline the scope and form of the conference and review some papers, and then make some points in relation to the jurisprudential approach.

2. Overview

Like the earlier conference, this one began with a number of tutorials. The two which I attended gave an interesting overview of the research which emerged over the following three days. In the morning Professor Donald Berman of Northeastern University Law School and Professor Kevin Ashley of University of Pittsburgh Law School gave an introduction to AI and Law. Don and Kevin, two of the leading practitioners/theorists in AI and Law are also gifted teachers, and the session was both well attended and very worthwhile. For those not familiar with fundamental concepts it was a marvellous introduction, and for those more comfortable with the area it provided some gems of insight. I found Kevin's presentation particularly enlightening about the potential uses of case based reasoning paradigms from outside the narrow legal domains. The modest cost of the tutorial was repaid just by one or two of the suggestions Don and Kevin made as to possible directions for research. The other tutorial which ran at the same time was 'On the Theory of Normative Positions and its Applications', given by Andrew Jones of the Norwegian Research Centre on Computers and Law, University of Oslo and Marek Sergot, Department of Computing, Imperial College London. This tutorial was aimed at the logic programmers and was apparently very successful.

The second tutorial session was run the same afternoon. It was equally informative and saw Dr Howard Turtle of West Publishing Inc. (the proprietors of the mammoth Westlaw database) discussing 'Text Retrieval in the Legal World'. I found this tutorial challenging and useful, since my expertise has not been in legal information retrieval. Howard ran through a deeply knowledgeable discussion of the special considerations in legal information retrieval, some information retrieval models and a range of philosophical questions about the ability of using these systems. He was instrumental in building the Bayesian Inference Network model into the WIN (Westlaw Is Natural) user interface, and so his discussion was extraordinarily deep. Further, since lawyers often care only about information retrieval rather than expert system advice, his presentation was most welcome.

The following day, after the tutorials, the conference opened. It ran for three days with no parallel sessions, and so one was not caught having to decide between two equally interesting papers. In all something in the order of forty papers of varying lengths were presented.

Though there were a broad range of topics, approaches and ideas given, it would perhaps be fair to identify two main themes: the use of exotic logics and the development of sophisticated case based reasoners. The exotic logics, for reasons that have always escaped me, have largely been and remained the preserve of the Europeans. Thus a number of non-monotonic and dianoetic logical formalism's were presented, including ones which could handle inconsistencies and, to a degree, case based reasoning. Perhaps due to my common law upbringing and my jurisprudential leanings (which fall well outside the Continental European/Kelsenian grundnorm theories) I found the use of exotic logics unconvincing. The logicians always seem to say that they can find a way to get around the difficulties of representing legal realities (like inconsistencies, open texture, cases, etc). Yet the approaches they suggest always appear murderously complicated to implement, inelegant, and artificial. But that is only my opinion, and certainly there were many logic based approaches which were well received.

The other major area of interest was the development of a range of case based reasoning systems. Some of these, like Ashley and Aleven's (described below), allowed for tremendously sophisticated legal reasoning on the basis of a given case base. Others combined case based reasoning with rule based reasoning to provide legal decision support for lawyers, paralegals and judges.

What then of the actual contents of some of these papers. I describe briefly below a number of papers which I thought were the most important. I am sure that many others are worthy of comment, but space forbids mention of everyone.

3. Selected papers

Thomas Gordon of the German National Research Centre for Computer Science presented a paper entitled 'The Pleadings Game: Formalising Procedural Justice'. It proposed a formal model of civil pleading based upon Alexy's discourse theory of legal argumentation. The sophistication of his approach allows for arguments about validity and priorities of rules at any stage in the 'game'. This accords with the legal practitioner's view of the use of positivistic rule systems, and so may well be the basis for practical systems in future.

Kevin Ashley and Vincent Aleven of the University of Pittsburgh had a paper expanding upon their earlier work. It was entitled 'What Law Students Need to Know to WIN'. The title is somewhat misleading, as I thought that it would deal only with Westlaw Is Natural (WIN), but in fact it was more generally concerned with the question of formal models of legal reasoning, and the implementation of a system to show law students these modes of legal reasoning. This system, called CATO, seeks to teach case based reasoning to law students and is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it represents one of the few attempts at implementing legal reasoning formalism's outside typical logical deduction and induction (or abduction for that matter). Further, it showed an interesting diagrammatical interface for students in adopting and distinguishing cases given a set of facts.

Karl Branting presented a paper on 'A Reduction Graph Model of Ratio Decidendi'. This paper showed the legal concept of ratio decidendi as a series of reasoning steps represented by a reduction-graph. Once again, Karl's use of jurisprudential theory marked this paper as a subtle and useful application of AI technology and methodologies to legal reasoning requirements. It further showed fundamental difficulties with the current crop of 'naive' case based reasoning paradigms.

But perhaps for me the most fascinating paper was presented by Don Berman. This paper, written by Professor Berman and Professor Carole Hafner, was entitled 'Representing Teleological Structure in Case-Based Legal Reasoning: The Missing Link'. It proposed a model and demonstrated an implementation which went beyond the naive fact-based approach in most case based legal reasoning systems. The problem with fact-based systems has always been their inability to match on policy/principles, and hence they have always had limited application. The model proposed by Berman and Hafner enabled the retrieval and use of teleological information, rather than simply surface level factual detail. This approach I believe holds great promise for more useful and jurisprudentially justifiable knowledge based systems in future.

Apart from these papers which were important from the perspective of pure research, there were a number of other papers worthy of comment as being interesting and useful applied systems. Some of these were commercial while others were in the public sector, but their most obvious characteristic was that they were often presented by Australians. The majority of practical systems described in the conference, and the vast majority of systems actually demonstrated as up and running, came from various Australian researchers. Thus there was Mowbray and Greenleaf's Privacy Workstation, Softlaw's major expert system shell and hypertext engine together with a number of huge systems built for government departments in Australia and New Zealand, a Chinese law system built by Graham Brown of Newcastle, and the 'Credit Act Advisory System' built by George Vossos and others for Allan Moore & Co, Solicitors in Melbourne. Many commented on the fact that it was the Australians above all others who had actually begun implementing systems with the theories previously expounded. This augurs well for research in Australia in future, and indeed it seems likely that the sixth ICAIL will be in Melbourne in 1996.

4. Jurisprudential aspects

It was interesting to note the number of papers given by computer scientists and the relative dearth of papers presented by lawyers. The better papers, such as those mentioned above were lead by lawyers who each had access in various ways to AI knowledge and methodologies. These papers all showed an understanding of the use to which legal knowledge based systems can be put, and a recognition of the difficulty and indeterminacy in law.

I was not so impressed however with the papers which had little or no legal input. Much has been made of the merits of law as a domain for AI researchers. It is true that law provides rich pickings, with some articulations of rules, principles, policy, and various meta systems for interpretation. However, many computer science oriented papers simply assumed legal principles which were largely unsupported and unsupportable. For example, in some papers notions of 'reasonableness' or 'fairness' were modelled as though they were constant, fixed and stable, and not the creature of almost entirely subjective interpretation. Other examples abound. It seems that the criticisms made by Dave Brown of the third ICAIL still hold true to some degree.

That said however, I still believe that we are progressing, both from the view of AI and from law. On the AI side, we are seeing a number of sophisticated logics, together with elaborate case based reasoning systems, which truly do offer some hope for the future. In conjunction with this, some non-positivist jurisprudence is creeping in, and information retrieval systems are being married with decision support systems to give the lawyers flexibility in adapting cases and statutory material to their own specific needs. It is to be hoped that the trend continues and that the conference does not become merely an exposition of programming skills or theory, and generates a genuinely interdisciplinary approach. We have begun to see some of this, and I suspect we will begin to see more at the fifth ICAIL, scheduled for January 1995 in Maryland, USA.


[1] Daniel Hunter B.Sc. LL.B.(Hons), Lecturer, Law School, University of Melbourne.

[2] Moles, R., 'Logic Programming - An Assessment of its Potential for Artificial Intelligence Applications in Law', (1992) 2 Journal of Law and Information Science pp137-164; Zeleznikow, J. and Hunter, D., 'Rationales for the Continued Development of Legal Expert Systems', (1992) Journal of Law and Information Science, pp 94-110; Moles, R.N. and Dayal, S., 'There is more to life than logic', (1993) 3 Journal of Law and Information Science pp 188-21; Hunter, D., Tyree, A. and Zeleznikow, J., 'There is less to this argument than meets the eye' (1993) Journal of Law and Information Science, pp 46-64.


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