Alan L. Tyree

Generating legal arguments

Legal reasoning in the Common Law system has elements of reasoning by analogy, of reasoning from example, and certain characteristics which are unique. A legal expert system must provide a sophisticated level of justification for its advice, for the justification is the systems most important product. A legal expert system and its associated report generating system is described here.

The privacy workstation

This article presents the purposes and operation of The Privacy Workstation, a knowledge-based application on Australian privacy law, developed for both research and commercial purposes as part of the DataLex Project on legal expert systems. The Workstation aims to be a general-purpose tool for privacy law research, administration, or advocacy. Any single computing technique is unlikely to be adequate to such a task, so the Workstation software integrates three techniques: hypertext browsing, free-text searching, and rule-based inferencing. A user may use any combination of these techniques in their own enquiries using the Workstation. The Workstation integrated three previous DataLex programs: • HYPE (v.2), a hypertext (or ‘text navigation’) engine; • AIRS (v.3), a text retrieval engine; • Y-SH (v.l), an inferencing engine. YSH, AIRS and HYPE comprise the three ‘engines’ within the Workstation software, but with a new common interface. This is the most comprehensive paper about the earliest version of the Workstation software and an application using it. The Privacy Workstation - User Manual is at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2993926

Legal Expert Systems: Words, Words Words...?

Some special features of the legal domain which affect the development of expert systems are examined, including: why ‘ready made rules’ are a problem, not an answer; the relationship between prescriptive laws and legal source materials; ‘rules’ of interpretation of statutes are not meta-rules; ‘precedents’ of case-law cannot always be treated as rules; the need for access to legal source materials; the relevance of ‘deep’ or causal models to the legal domain; reasons why lawyers must play the main role in developing legal expert systems. DATALEX, a joint research project by the authors which commenced in 1986, is outlined. Its main aims are: (i) to develop a shell which integrates a number of inferencing techniques in a consistent environment, and is itself integrated with a free text retrieval system. The shell, LES (Legal Expert System), includes decision network and nearest neighbour discriminant analysis modules; other inferencing modules are being added; and a free-text retrieval system, AIRS, is being integrated with LES. (ii) to use this shell, and to encourage others to use it, to develop a range of knowledge-based applications in different areas of Australian law. Applications as yet concern intestacy, copyright, the finding of chattels, and other areas of law. (iii) to use these applications as a teaching resource to encourage interest in and understanding of knowledge-based techniques and their potential by Australian lawyers.This 1987 paper was the first paper published about the DataLex Project, which ran from 1985-1995.