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I have long been interested in the possibility of a legal AI, although only as a mental exercise (with lawyer parents and siblings, hard not to :) ).

I didn't know there were advancements in the AI field pertaining to that, I'll try to look them up, but would be very grateful if someone could point them out :)

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I'm not really an expert in the area; have just run across some sessions on it at the general yearly AI conferences I attend (AAAI, ECAI, and/or IJCAI). The keywords "legal reasoning" and "legal argumentation system" will get you quite a lot of stuff though. The latter bleeds into general "argumentation systems", since one way of modeling legal reasoning (though not the only one) is that it's a specific sub-species of debate or argumentation, rather than a specific sub-species of logical inference. (Of course, you might ask: isn't debate ideally logical as well? Empirically, it seems, the answer is: not entirely.)

Thanks! Both the explanation and the keywords will direct my search handily :)

There's also a section on the Wikipedia article on Argumentation theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentation_theory

"Computational argumentation systems have found particular application in domains where formal logic and classical decision theory are unable to capture the richness of reasoning, domains such as law and medicine"

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