The days of proprietary legal databases are rapidly ending, as primary legal materials become available on the World Wide Web. In the United States, for example, the decisions of the Supreme Court are now available on line all the way back to 1893. The decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeal are also available, dating back several years in most cases. State materials are not as complete, but man...

How do lawyers decide which cases to accept? Previous studies suggest that they use a simple risk/return formula to make such decisions. I argue, however, that legal environments also shape lawyers’ decisions. Analyses of in-depth interviews with lawyers across four states demonstrate that lawyers make different decisions about cases in different legal environments. Lawyers in states without to...

Technologies enabling digital piracy have expanded the variety of options available to users when deciding how to access a product. As a result, access-mode decisions for film and music are broader than for other goods where the piracy option is not as prevalent. This paper presents a model of access-mode decisions for film and music which integrates elements of previous digital piracy models a...

Experiencing ubiquitous contention, the correlation between execution as a form of legal punishment and morality pervades in the modern era to form a central concern for examination. Competing accounts of moral theories have provided dichotomous vindications for capital punishment, indicating a substantial strife in criminal justice morality. This thesis will examine these rival philosophies in...

Legal case solving is a central activity of legal practitioners. This may account for the fact that legal case solving has a place within legal education. However, students experience difficulties learning to solve legal cases and teachers find it difficult to teach it. To offer students support with the learning of legal case solving the computer program PROSA1 has been constructed. PROSA is a...

Experiments described here demonstrate a role that intermediate legal concepts play in predicting the decisions of new cases. The experiments compare variations of each of an Issue-Based Prediction algorithm (IBP) and a CATO prediction algorithm in which the use of legal concepts are ablated in various ways. The results confirm those legal philosophical theories that assert that intermediate co...

Most legal systems are based on the premise that defendants are treated as innocent until proven guilty and that decisions will be unbiased and solely based on the facts of the case. The validity of this assumption has been questioned for cases involving racial minority members, in that racial bias among jury members may influence jury decisions. The current research shows that legal profession...

This paper analyses the multi-level network composed of the legal decisions taken by the International Criminal Court since its creation in 2002. As many real-world networks, legal networks lend themselves to the use of graphs in which nodes represent the decisions taken by the Court and links stand for citations between decisions. Although useful, this framework does not account for the inhere...

This paper discusses an attribution problem that is particularly critical for argumentation mining in judicial decisions, and the development of a legal discourse model as an important component of any solution to that problem. Attribution in this context is the problem of determining who believes a stated proposition to be true. This is a particularly difficult problem for developing natural l...