A Theory Construction Approach to Legal Document Assembly

نویسندگان

  • Thomas F. Gordon
  • James Sprowl
چکیده

An overview of a software system under development for “assembling” legal documents is presented. The system applies Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods and is founded on a theory construction or abduction view of legal reasoning. The AI methods employed include an Assumption-based Truth Maintenance System (ATMS), a Natural Deduction theorem prover, and an implementation of Poole's approach to default reasoning. Legal Document Assembly There has been very little published work on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to the problem of constructing legal documents. The bulk of the legal expert systems literature is concerned “only” with the problem of supporting the task of deciding legal cases, i.e. of identifying and analyzing the legal issues raised by the facts of some case. With the exception of the German KOKON project [Kowalewski 86], where an attempt was made to represent legal rules using Horn clauses, I am aware of no previous attempt to develop an integrated approach to legal analysis and documentation using AI methods. The work described here is one attempt to fill this gap. The usual approach to “assembling” legal documents is procedural. James Sprowl developed the seminal system of this type, the ABF Processor [Sprowl 80]. Essentially, the ABF Processor is a special-purpose imperative programming language for writing programs for drafting documents of a certain type. Sprowl's achievement was in making the ABF Processor especially “lawyer-friendly”. In principle, of course, such programs can be written in any general-purpose programming language, such as Lisp or Pascal, but these general purpose programming languages demand a great deal more programming expertise from the lawyer/programmer; the required data types and operations must first be constructed out of lower-level facilities. Moreover, Sprowl's language has the attractive feature that expressions and commands of the language are embedded directly in the text segments to be used, which greatly increases the comprehensibility of the resulting programs. Sprowl published his paper on the ABF Processor in 1979, but only recently have such document assembly systems begun to be used in actual legal practice. The ABF Processor itself is now commercially available. Similar programs are available, 1The work reported here was conducted as part of the Assisting Computer (AC) project of GMD’s Institute for Applied Information Technology. I would like to thank my colleagues Joachim Hertzberg, Alexander Horz and Hartmut Bewernick for their assistance and encouragement.

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تاریخ انتشار 1989