Logical Judges Challenge Human Judges on the Strange Case of B.C.-Valjean

The connections between logic programming and law have been studied for a long time. In 1975, Meldman discussed his PhD Thesis entitled "A preliminary study in computer-aided legal analysis" [12] where he modelled legal facts in a Lisp-like language and used instantiation (recalling unification) and syllogism (recalling resolution) to perform a simple kind of legal analysis inspired by Prosser's Law of Torts [13]. At that time Prolog was just born, but its applications to legal reasoning were not long in coming. One of the first attempts was made by Hustler [9] who implemented a prototype of a legal consultant in Prolog, again inspired by Prosser's work. A few years later, Kowalski, Sergot et al. succeeded in running a significant portion of the 1981 British Nationality Act, implemented in Prolog on a small micro computer [15]. In the same years, Prolog became very popular for implementing expert systems for the legal domain [3, 19]. From those early attempts, much progress has been made: research on deontic and defeasible reasoning [1, 5], ontological reasoning [7], and argumentation [8, 18] is extremely lively and helps disclosing the many connections between logic programming (and, more in general, computational logic and automated reasoning) and legal reasoning. The application of automated reasoning to digital forensics is another promising research direction [6] whose potential is witnessed by the ongoing "Digital Forensics: Evidence Analysis via Intelligent Systems and Practices" (DigForASP) COST Action