Evaluating cases in legal disputes as rival theories

Authors:
Pontus Stenetorp;Jason Jingshi Li
Affiliations:
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;College of Engineering and Computer Science, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia and Canberra Research Laboratory, NICTA, Canberra, Australia
Venue:
JSAI-isAI'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on New frontiers in artificial intelligence
Year:
2009

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Abstract

In this paper we propose to draw a link from the quantitative notion of coherence, previously used to evaluate rival scientific theories, to legal reasoning. We evaluate the stories of the plaintiff and the defendant in a legal case as rival theories by measuring how well they cohere when accounting for the evidence. We show that this gives rise to a formalized comparison between rival cases that account for the same set of evidence, and provide a possible explanation as to why judgements may favour one side over the other. We illustrate our approach by applying it to a known legal dispute from the literature.