Advisory systems for pro se litigants

  • Authors:

  • L. Karl Branting

  • Affiliations:

  • U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Fellow, Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, Washington, D.C.

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law
  • Year:
  • 2001

  • Computational law

    ICAIL '05 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law

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Abstract

Increasing numbers of litigants represent themselves in court. Advisory systems designed to help litigants understand the available legal remedies and satisfy the substantive and procedural requirements to obtain those remedies have the potential to assist these litigants and thereby reduce the burden that they impose on the courts. This paper presents a four-component model of advisory systems for prose litigants. This model was implemented in the Protection Order Advisory (POA), an advisory system for pro se Protection Order applicants, POA illustrates how existing inference, document-drafting, and interface-design techniques can be used to construct advisory systems for pro se litigants in a wide range of legal domains for which (1) determining whether a prima facie case is satisfied does not require open-textured reasoning, and (2) the documents required to initiate an action are characterized by homogeneity and simple structure.