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Thirty years of Artificial Intelligence and Law: overviews

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Abstract

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper discusses several topics that relate more naturally to groups of papers than a single paper published in the journal: ontologies, reasoning about evidence, the various contributions of Douglas Walton, and the practical application of the techniques of AI and Law.

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Notes

  1. See Sect. 9 of Sartor et al. (2022), elsewhere in this issue, for a discussion of different approaches to representing Popov v Hayashi.

  2. I’ve also tried to stimulate practitioner involvement in the biannual AI and Law conferences.

  3. “Today’s commercial practice system tools - well evolved from the modest beginnings of document assembly yet only suggestive of what artificial intelligence ought to be able to deliver - provide a kind of Jacquard loom upon which to weave some of the fabric of lawyering. Perhaps these tools can inspire more intelligent systems in the same way that loom inspired computer pioneer Charles Babbage.” Thirty years later, my impression is that we’ve indeed seen plenty of inspiration, but not nearly enough positive impact yet on how law is practiced, in large part due to artisanal intransigence.

  4. One of the most successful practical developments was Mead and Johnston’s Softlaw. There were ICAIL papers, Johnson and Mead (1991) and Dayal et al. (1993), but never anything in the journal, perhaps because it had already become commercial before the journal was launched. Softlaw became Ruleburst before being taken over by Oracle and now exists as Oracle Policy Automation (https://community.oracle.com/tech/apps-infra/discussion/4107512/opa-product-history-question). This is an example of how, once commercial, systems drop off the academic scene.

  5. https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal-informatics/

  6. See https://suffolklitlab.org/ and https://www.law.northwestern.edu/student-life/events/law-and-technology/

  7. See e.g. https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2019/12/18/ai-and-law-expert-to-feature-in-royal-institutions-christmas-lecture/

  8. A prime example is Medvedeva et al. (2020) (discussed in Sect. 6 of Villata et al. (2022), elsewhere in this issue). Limitations of this approach are widely discussed from a variety of perspectives, technical, philosophical and legal: e.g. Bench-Capon (2020), Bex and Prakken (2021) Steging et al. (2021), Bibal et al. (2021) and Medvedeva et al. (2022). Its very compatibility with the rule of law is questioned in Suksi (2021).

  9. The idea dates back at least to Kowalski and Sergot (1985) but remains current in papers such as Kowalski and Datoo (2021) and Shein (2021). There was also a recent workshop on Programming Languages and the Law 2022, https://popl22.sigplan.org/home/prolala-2022.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

    Michał Araszkiewicz

  2. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Trevor Bench-Capon

  3. National Research Council of Italy (IGSG-CNR), Florence, Italy

    Enrico Francesconi

  4. European Parliament, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Enrico Francesconi

  5. Capstone Practice Systems, Harvard, MA, USA

    Marc Lauritsen

  6. University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Antonino Rotolo

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  1. Michał Araszkiewicz
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Araszkiewicz, M., Bench-Capon, T., Francesconi, E. et al. Thirty years of Artificial Intelligence and Law: overviews. Artif Intell Law 30, 593–610 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-022-09324-9

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