Mining legal arguments in court decisions

Approaches to Text Mining Arguments from Legal Cases

This paper describes recent approaches using text-mining to automatically profile and extract arguments from legal cases. We outline some of the background context and motivations. We then turn to consider issues related to the construction and composition of a corpora of legal cases. We show how a Context-Free Grammar can be used to extract arguments, and how ontologies and Natural Language Pr...

Teaching Creative Legal Reasoning with Examples from Supreme Court Oral Arguments

Transcripts of oral arguments before the US Supreme Court provide interesting examples of creative legal reasoning. They illustrate, often in dramatic fashion, a sophisticated process of concept formation and testing driven by skillful posing of hypothetical examples. From the viewpoint of legal education, however, taking advantage of this resource presents challenges. The underlying processes ...

Legal Representation in the Chinese Criminal Court

Teen Court Jurors’ Sentencing Decisions

Teen Courts provide a forum in which juvenile offenders are sentenced by their peers. This system, based on principles of restorative justice, serves as an alternative to the traditional juvenile justice system. Sentencing options typically include restitution, community service, jury duty, apologies, attendance at educational workshops, and tours of correctional facilities. Previous research h...

Recognizers: Arguments and Design Decisions

The Forth text interpreter processes words and numbers. Currently the set of words can be extended by programmers, but not the recognized numbers. User-defined recognizers allow to extend the number-recognizer part, too. This paper shows the benefits of recognizers and discusses counterarguments. It also discusses several design decisions: Whether to define temporary words, or a set of interpre...