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Formalising ordinary legal disputes: a case study

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Abstract

This paper presents a formal reconstruction of a Dutch civil legal case in Prakken’s formal model of adjudication dialogues. The object of formalisation is the argumentative speech acts exchanged during the dispute by the adversaries and the judge. The goal of this formalisation is twofold: to test whether AI & law models of legal dialogues in general, and Prakken’s model in particular, are suitable for modelling particular legal procedures; and to learn about the process of formalising an actual legal dispute.

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Notes

  1. The numbering of the statute sections below is as it was at the time of the case, in 1974–1978.

  2. Strictly speaking arguments in this logic are deductions instead of proof trees, but the conversion between these formats is straightforward.

  3. In this table he complement of a formula \(\varphi,\) denoted by \(-\varphi,\) is \(\neg \varphi\) if \(\varphi\) does not start with a negation and \(\varphi^{\prime}\) if \(\varphi = \neg \varphi^{\prime}.\)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Henry Prakken

  2. Centre for Law & ICT, Faculty of Law, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Henry Prakken

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  1. Henry Prakken
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Correspondence to Henry Prakken.

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Prakken, H. Formalising ordinary legal disputes: a case study. Artif Intell Law 16, 333–359 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-008-9069-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-008-9069-1

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