Arguing about cases as practical reasoning

  • Authors:

  • Katie Atkinson;Trevor Bench-Capon;Peter McBurney

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK;University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK;University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

  • Venue:
  • ICAIL '05 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In this paper we apply a general account of practical reasoning to arguing about legal cases. In particular, we describe how the reasoning in one very well known property law case can be reconstructed in terms of our account. We begin by summarising our general approach which uses instantiations of an argumentation scheme to provide presumptive justifications for actions, and critical questions to identify arguments which attack these justifications. These arguments and attacks are organised into argumentation frameworks to identify the status of individual arguments. Different beliefs about, and perspectives on, the issue are represented by different agents based on the Belief-Desire-Intention model, and conditions under which these agents may advance justifications and attack them are described. We model the different views of our case in these terms, describe the resulting argumentation frameworks, and relate them to the original majority and dissenting opinions. We contend that this approach both shows the worth of the general approach and its applicability to the legal domain.