Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning

In this article, I discuss the emerging field of artificial intelligence and legal reasoning and review the new book by Anne v.d.L. Gardner, An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning, published by Bradford/MIT Press (1987, 225 pp., $22.50) as the first book in its new series on the subject. Dworkin 1977, 1985) offer insights valuable to AI, their jurisprudential analyses often raise more questions than they answer and their insights, couched in philosophical discourse, are difficult to harness computationally. Much of the knowledge used in legal reasoning is published, codified, and highly indexed. The legal system maintains extremely detailed records of its cases and commentary on them and except for the lowest-level courts, all cases are published and indexed commercially. For example, Shepard's Citations records and updates all forward and backward pointers for cases; that is, for a given case, all the succeeding cases citing it as well as all the cases it cited.