Discovery and Justification of Judicial Decisions: Towards More Precise Distinctions in Legal Decision-Making

Weighing and Balancing in the Justification of Judicial Decisions

In legal theory, it is widely claimed that decisions in hard cases are based on weighing and balancing. However no reconstructions are given of the deep structure of the complex argumenation underlying the justification of these decisions. The author develops a model for the analysis of weighing and balancing of arguments in the justification of judicial decisions that are based on teleological...

Basic and legal analysis of the justification or non-justification of killing in defense of property

Justifying or not justifying killing in defense of property has always been a challenging issue for jurists Western jurists have studied such killing in the light of the principle of proportionalit. . That is,whether there is a balance and proportionality between defensive action - killing aggressor- and aggressive action - attacking property – or not. based on this principle, some believe that...

Towards More Flexible Automatic Decision Making

Decision networks and decision trees are typical frameworks that underly most of the systems that are able to make automatic decisions under uncertainty. Decision networks are also known as influence diagrams and apply probabilistic inference among chance variables in a similar way as Bayesian networks. In addition, decision networks contain decision nodes and value nodes with associated utilit...

Decision Trees: More Theoretical Justification

We study impurity-based decision tree algorithms such as CART, C4.5, etc., so as to better understand their theoretical underpinnings. We consider such algorithms on special forms of functions and distributions. We deal with the uniform distribution and functions that can be described as unate functions, linear threshold functions and readonce DNF. For unate functions we show that that maximal ...

Passion in Legal Argument and Judicial Decision Making: A Comment on Goldberg v. Kelly