Readers choosing to download the article--one must use the "other links" tab--should please be so kind as to respect the author's wishes and also see the Erratum et Corrigendum which is locally available by simply clicking on the article title. -/- Cross-examination of witnesses is not an opportunity to explore the beliefs of those on the stand on even relevant matters. Rather, it is an opportunity to impeach evidence given by the witness during direct examination. That is possible in two (...) ways: questioning the credibility of the witness directly, for example by bringing up a perjury conviction or by asking what favors he received in expectation of his future testimony, or questioning the witness’ credibility indirectly, by trying to disassemble the story he has woven on examination-in-chief. We are concerned with formalizing this last process. Like the question of the whole truth, the questioner is allowed considerable latitude, but that latitude is bounded by the examination in-chief. Also like that question, any formalization will have to use a logic which models questions and answers, not just propositions. Such a logic is called an erotetic logic, and we review the basics of the erotetic logic we will be using and then present our formalization using that logic. (shrink)

This is a review article of Tokuyasu Kakuta, Makoto Haraguchi, and Yoshiaki Okubo, “A Goal-Dependent Abstraction for Legal Reasoning by Analogy,” /Artificial Intelligence and Law/ 5(March 1997): 97-118.

Judicial obligation to enforce the law is typically regarded as both unproblematic and important: unproblematic because there is little reason to doubt that judges have a general, if prima facie, obligation to enforce law, and important because the obligation gives judges significant reason to limit their concern in adjudication to applying the law. I challenge both of these assumptions and argue that norms of political legitimacy, which may be extra-legal, are irretrievably at the basis of responsible judicial reasoning.

Various authors debate the question of whether neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility. However, a plethora of different techniques and technologies, each with their own abilities and drawbacks, lurks beneath the label “neuroscience”; and in criminal law responsibility is not a single, unitary and generic concept, but it is rather a syndrome of at least six different concepts. Consequently, there are at least six different responsibility questions that the criminal law asks – at least one for each responsibility concept – (...) and, I will suggest, a multitude of ways in which the techniques and technologies that comprise neuroscience might help us to address those diverse questions. In a way, on my account neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility in many ways, but I hesitate to state my position like this because doing so obscures two points which I would rather highlight: one, neither neuroscience nor criminal responsibility are as unified as that; and two, the criminal law asks many different responsibility questions and not just one generic question. (shrink)