Although law is a domain of rules, legal reasoning is not, strictly, a domain of logic. Legal rules tend to be incomplete, logically and semantically ambiguous, and sometimes inconsistent. Yet attorneys and judges apply them in remarkably systematic ways. Legal reasoning offers researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) an opportunity to study a highly developed complementary system of reasoning where drawing analogies to past cases or precedents and arguing from opposing adversarial viewpoints help to cope with the infirmities of rules and the limitations of logic. Researchers in AI and Law operationally define concepts like applying a legal rule, separating "hard" from "easy" questions, drawing analogies to relevant cases, distinguishing a case, and posing counterexamples. The seminar will involve AI graduate students and law students. The goals of the seminar will be to introduce the fundamentals of AI to law students and of legal reasoning to graduate students and jointly to grapple with the work of researchers in AI and Law. Readings will consist of excerpts from works by legal scholars and accessible research papers describing fundamental AI techniques and AI programs designed for legal domains.
Prerequisites: participating graduate students should have a general understanding of AI approaches to representing knowledge and controlling inference and experience in applying AI techniques to some practical domain
Recitations: none
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Credits: 3