Legal Inquiry and Legal Arguments

A Jurisprudential Inquiry into Contemporary Legal Theory

TO FUNDAMENTAL JURISPRUDENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 814 R II. THE FOUNDING BLOCKS OF CONTEMPORARY LEGAL THEORY: SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 820 R III. LAW BEYOND SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE: CASE STUDIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 825 R A. Law as Science and Codifi...

Extracting Legal Arguments from Forensic Bayesian Networks

Recent developments in the forensic sciences have confronted the field of legal reasoning with the new challenge of reasoning under uncertainty. Forensic results come with uncertainty and are described in terms of likelihood ratios and random match probabilities. The legal field is unfamiliar with numerical valuations of evidence, which has led to confusion and in some cases to serious miscarri...

A General Structure for Legal Arguments

A Bayesian network (BN) is a graphical model of uncertainty that is especially well-suited to legal arguments. It enables us to visualise and model dependencies between different hypotheses and pieces of evidence and to calculate the revised probability beliefs about all uncertain factors when any piece of new evidence is presented. Although BNs have been widely discussed and recently used in t...

Constructing Legal Arguments with Rules in the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF)

The Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), being developed in the European ESTRELLA project, defines a knowledge representation language for arguments, rules, ontologies, and cases in XML. In this article, the syntax and argumentation-theoretic semantics of the LKIF rule language is presented and illustrated with an example based on German family law. This example is then applied to show ho...

Economic and Legal Arguments in PPL v. Commissioner