Jaromír Šavelka

Coherence: Insights from Philosophy, Jurisprudence and Artificial Intelligence

This book is a thorough treatise concerned with coherence and its significance in legal reasoning. The individual chapters present the topic from the general philosophical perspective, the perspective of legal-theory as well as the viewpoint of cognitive sciences and the research on artificial intelligence and law. As it has turned out the interchange of knowledge among these disciplines is very fruitful for each of them, providing mutual inspiration and increasing understanding of a given topic. This book is a unique resource for anyone interested in the concept of coherence and the role it plays in reasoning. As this book captures important contemporary issues concerning the ongoing discussion on coherence and law, those interested in legal reasoning should find it particularly helpful. By presenting such a broad scope of views and methods on approaching the issue of coherence we hope to promote the general interest in the topic as well as the academic research that centers around coherence and law.

Transfer of predictive models for classification of statutory texts in multi-jurisdictional settings

In this paper we use statistical machine learning to classify statutory texts in terms of highly specific functional categories. We focus on regulatory provisions from multiple US state jurisdictions, all dealing with the same general topic of public health system emergency preparedness and response. In prior work we have established that one can improve classification performance on one jurisdictions statutory texts using texts from another jurisdiction. Here we describe a framework facilitating transfer of predictive models for classification of statutory texts among multiple state jurisdictions. Our results show that the classification performance improves as we employ an increasing number of models trained on data coming from different states.

Coherence as Constraint Satisfaction: Judicial Reasoning Support Mechanism

This chapter proposes coherence as constraint satisfaction as a suitable mechanism to be considered for judicial reasoning support. First of all it establishes a notion of ‘legal problem solving’ and draws intuitive parallels to algorithm as ‘computational problem solving procedure’. Then, Thagard’s coherence as constraint satisfaction is introduced to the reader as a general problem solving mechanism/formalism. The chapter continues with an overview of the main concerns and objections that are to be found in fields of law and computer science against a large-scale deployment of any formal mechanism as a tool for support of judicial reasoning. A list of requirements any formal mechanism must meet in order to be a viable candidate for such a deployment is then formulated. Finally, coherence as constraint satisfaction is briefly checked if it meets the requirements. It is concluded that it seems to meet them and thus, to be a mechanism worth considering of a large-scale deployment as a judicial reasoning support formalism.

Extracting Case Law Sentences for Argumentation about the Meaning of Statutory Terms.

Legal argumentation often centers on the interpretation and understanding of terminology. Statutory texts are known for a frequent use of vague terms that are difficult to understand. Arguments about the meaning of statutory terms are an inseparable part of applying statutory law to a specific factual context. In this work we investigate the possibility of supporting this type of argumentation by automatic extraction of sentences that deal with the meaning of a term. We focus on case law because court decisions often contain sentences elaborating on the meaning of one or more terms. We show that human annotators can reasonably agree on the usefulness of a sentence for an argument about the meaning (interpretive usefulness) of a specific statutory term (kappa>0.66). We specify a list of features that could be used to predict the interpretive usefulness of a sentence automatically. We work with offthe-shelf classification algorithms to confirm the hypothesis (accuracy>0.69).

Annotated Corpus of Czech Case Law for Reference Recognition Tasks.

We describe an annotated corpus of 350 decisions of Czech top-tier courts which was gathered for a project assessing the relevance of court decisions in Czech law. We describe two layers of processing of the corpus; every decision was annotated by two trained annotators and then manually adjudicated by one trained curator to solve possible disagreements between annotators. This corpus was developed as training and testing material for reference recognition tasks which will be further used for research on assessment of legal importance. However, the overall shortage of available research corpora of annotated legal texts, particularly in Czech language, leads us to believe that other research teams may find it useful.

Free Licenses and Recodification of Civil Law in the Czech Republic

This chapter provides general information on the legal status of Free and Open Source Software Licenses (e.g. GNU General Public License, the MIT License) and other alternative licenses (e.g. Creative Commons) under Czech law. The issues are discussed under both contract law and copyright law following the recodification of Czech civil law through the adoption of the new Czech Civil Code. The discussed topics concerning contract law include, inter alia, the legal nature of F/OSS and alternative licenses (i.e. whether they are to be construed as contracts or unilateral instruments), formal requirements, standard terms and conditions, language issues, special rules of interpretation, disclaimers of warranty and liability and the termination of granted licenses. The issues of copyright law include, inter alia, the interpretation of broad and unspecific terms in license contracts, questions concerning unknown modes of use of a work at the time of the conclusion of the license agreement, revocation or rescission rights in copyright legislation, sub-licensing, statutory rights for equitable remuneration, participation in the distribution of revenues by collection societies, the right to modify the copyrighted work and moral rights, and remedies in the case of termination of the licensee’s right. Other issues, e.g. the competition law aspects of F/OSS licenses, are also discussed.

Open Texture in Law, Legal Certainty and Logical Analysis of Natural Language

In this paper we use logical analysis of natural language to analyse a dilemma every legislator faces. This dilemma presents itself as a gap between what is literally prescribed by a legal rule and what goal had the legislator in mind when enacting it. First, we describe this dilemma in detail. We use Hart’s example of a rule prohibiting vehicles from entering the park to show how the dilemma could pass to a decision maker if it is not sufficiently addressed by a legislator. Then, we discuss how logical analysis of natural language could be used in order to mitigate, or at least assess, severity of the dilemma passed from a legislator to a decision maker. In general, we advocate usefulness of logical analysis of natural language in legislature as well as in legal decision making.