Legal Decisions and Integrated Systems

1: Legal decisions In the field of legal informatics research it has also been argued that knowledge based systems, and especially expert systems, could be of considerable assistance to lawyers and, therefore, many experiments have been carried out on automated advisory systems. An expert system is software that simulates the reasoning of one or more human experts (usually the author or authors of the program) and is able to transfer its specialized knowledge to users. These are normally specialized users (such as for instance judges, lawyers or notaries in case the application is oriented to the law). However, a system cannot be called "expert" when it only provides expertise, even if it is that of more than one expert. "The system as De Mulder argues must be able to learn, to communicate in natural languages and to make unexpected replies; that is, it should possess its own creativity" [10]. In order to make it of some practical utility, the system should contain, apart from expert knowledge, general and formal principles that are the bases of interpretation and the practical application of the law, both by the legislator and the courts. In short, it should contain all those elements constituting "empirical knowledge" or "knowledge of reality". Supplying systems with this kind of knowledge would mean studying the construction of models of legal phenomena more closely (for example, it would be valuable to analyse the effects of national legislation in order to evaluate how a law is applied in practice, how words are used in the text, what meaning is to be given to words and phrases). These studies are, however, very complex and up until now experiments of this kind have still not been carried out, with the result that we cannot talk about real knowledge based systems in law. The experiments implemented so far may only be defined as "legal advisory systems", "legal aid systems" and not as "expert systems" or "knowledge based systems" or "Artificial Intelligence systems". We are dealing with programs informing and supporting the user in specific domains, on the basis of wide legal knowledge. They are all the more useful when they are structured to work as "checking" tools, like a kind of memory for the user regarding facts and data that has to be taken into account when deciding on a particular case [17] [25]. When there is no unambiguous interpretation for a particular law and the decisions made for analogous cases are controversial, it is certainly not enough to consult and ask a group of experts to discuss the matter among them, for the purpose of evaluating their answers and then choosing, on the basis of quantitative criteria, the solution to adopt as a reply in the system. Undoubtedly, knowledge of legal authority and legal precedents is useful but cannot lead to a conclusive evaluation [18]. The very concept of analogy is subjective. It is precisely in making these choices that the lawyer's professional ability is manifested. Judges also are not always capable of discussing the theoretical categories they use in decision making. They must worry about defining the concrete case and not about writing a treatise, whereby that which is read in a decision is only a hint about something far wider and completely implicit. All judges have different ideas about how to construct the legal schemata and categories to which to refer. The level of analysis differs from case to case and from one judge to another in the same branch of the law. On the other hand, there is always an important relationship between facts and categories: the retrieval of certain facts instead of others implies the use of certain categories rather than others, like the categories in which it is assumed there is a certain type of factual knowledge that they are called upon to classify [19]. It is, therefore, difficult to think that all this complexity can be adequately dealt with in an automated system.