In jurisprudence methodological shifts of practical significance have seldom or never happened overnight. The discussion concerning legal methods and legal reasoning has been a challenge primarily for legal philosophers and many legal movements basically mirror a theoretical development. Nor is it always an easy task to elucidate methodological aspects related to legal reasoning in works of jur...

Legal reasoning is one application of large-scale knowledge information processing, where arti cial intelligence, natural language processing, databases and other technologies are integrated. From the database point of view, legal reasoning requires access to vast data and knowledge sources such as written law and unwritten law. Because it is di cult for a person to deal with such amounts of le...

Whereas in all existing systems, legal reasoning is rule-based, over time legal rules have been amended by exceptions and counter-exceptions. Therefore, legal rules are not strict, but defeasible. We report on an approach of using Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP) for the development of the LiZ system, a knowledge-based decision support system for private law. A knowledge base containing lega...

In this short paper, I shall argue that legal philosophers ought to focus more than they have done so far on problems of reasoning. Not only is a field with many philosophically interesting questions consider, but it also, in my estimation, the which can contribute most both practice and study law. The law is, after all, an argumentative practice. Lawyers judges aim provide solutions concrete r...

This paper discusses examples, p a r t i c u l a r l y hypo the t i ca ls , t he i r use and generat ion, in legal reasoning. It examines the use of sequences of hypo the t i ca ls .

In legal reasoning systems, a typical application of normative reasoning, partial information plays an important role in the representation and reasoning of legal knowledge. To construct a legal knowledge-base with partial information, many features are required of knowledge representation languages. In this paper, we discuss the representation of knowledge-bases and their re nement through our...

Outline Outline Restatement Restatement of of the differences between the differences between legal rules and legal rules and legal legal principles principles Theory of coherence as constraint Theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction satisfaction applied to applied to legal reasoning legal reasoning (a (a glimpse glimpse)) Case study Case study