A Process Model of Legal Argument with Hypotheticals

  • Authors:

  • Kevin Ashley;Collin Lynch;Niels Pinkwart;Vincent Aleven

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Learning Research and Development Center and Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;Clausthal University of Technology, Department of Informatics, Germany;Carnegie Mellon University, HCI Institute, Pittsburgh PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2008: The Twenty-First Annual Conference
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This paper presents a process model of arguing with hypotheticals and uses it to explain examples of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court that are like those employed in Socratic law teaching. The process model has been partially implemented in the LARGO (Legal ARgument Graph Observer) intelligent tutoring system. The program supports students in diagramming oral argument examples; its feedback on students' diagrammatic reconstructions of the examples enforces the expectations of the process model. The paper presents empirical evidence that features of the argument diagrams made with LARGO are correlated with independent measures of argumentation ability. The examples and empirical results support the model's explanatory and diagnostic utility.