Dialogues in US Supreme Court Oral Hearings

Dialogue protocols in Artificial Intelligence and Law have become increasingly stylised, intended to examine the logic of particular legal phenomena such as burden of proof, rather than the procedures within which these phenomena occur. In this paper we will return to the original idea of using dialogue to model particular procedures by examining some very particular dialogues those found in oral hearings of the US Supreme Court. We will then consider some important characteristics of these dialogues, and illustrate the paper with examples taken from a close analysis of a case often modelled in AI and Law, California v Carney (1985).