| Abstract: The development of intelligent legal
information processing systems depends critically on availability of representations of
legal knowledge. Some of the application areas envisioned for intelligent legal systems
include retrieval systems, argument and reasoning systems, legal decision-making systems,
and drafting systems. Successful implementation of systems of these types has been
hampered by a lack of adequate knowledge representation for the underlying legal concepts.
We need both representations of everyday situations and of subtle legal concepts like
rights, duties, and contracts. This paper reviews some of the recent work in representing
legal situations and discusses the special knowledge representation questions that arise
in developing legal information processing systems. We concentrate on the computational
aspects of Hohfeldian concepts of rights and duties, deontic logic, representation of
legal arguments, and the semantics of legal situations. |
