Eveline T. Feteris: Fundamentals of legal argumentation

Excerpt

Argumentation has been at the heart of the AI and Law enterprise since its very beginning. One of the earliest AI and Law programs, Taxman (McCarty 1976), attempted to model the majority and minority arguments in a leading case, Eisner v Macomber, computationally. Since then many AI and Law researchers have explored legal argumentation, using both formal techniques (see Prakken and Sartor (2015) for a survey) and more empirical techniques (see Bench-Capon 2017). Equally long standing is the investigation of legal argumentation from the perspective of argumentation theory¹, in particular that of the pragma-dialectics group at the University of Amsterdam, from which this book originates. Eveline Feteris has been a long standing member (since 1986) of this group, and has published extensively on legal argumentation including (Feteris 1994, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2008) and (Feteris 2016). The book under review is a completely updated, revised and extended second edition: the first edition was published in 1999, so updating was very much required. Given this commonality of interest, and proximity (University of Amsterdam has also hosted an AI and Law group, currently known as the Leibnitz Centre for Law, throughout this period), it is perhaps surprising that there has not been more interaction between the two communities, In fact the two communities have remained relatively distinct with their own journals (Artificial Intelligence and Law as against Argumentation and Informal Logic) and their own conferences (ICAIL and JURIX as against OSSA in Canada and ISSA in Amsterdam). There was an attempt to bring the communities together in 1996 when there was a workshop Dialectical Legal Argument: Formal and Informal Models, held in conjunction with JURIX, at Tilburg, with speakers drawn from both AI and Law and pragma-dialectics. Although this led to a special issue of AI and Law (Volume 8, Issue 2–3, 2000) edited by Eveline Feteris and Henry Prakken (Feteris and Prakken 2000), its success was limited, and there was little further interchange beyond some individual interaction (Henry Prakken and Bart Verheij are acknowledged in this book for their comments on and critiques of the chapters on the Logical Approach and Toulmin’s model respectively). The workshop revealed significant differences in aims (building computational and formal models on the one hand and informal models on the other) and, perhaps more importantly, culture. As an example, the AI and Law speakers, coming from Computer Science, presented their papers in a rather informal fashion using overheads, while the pragma-dialectitians, coming from Philosophy, literally read their papers, word for word, as was (and perhaps still is) normal for philosophy papers. The result of the workshop was to emphasise differences rather than discover commonalities and there has been very little coming together at the community level since. This is not intended as a criticism of either community, more an indication of how hard it is to sustain interdisciplinary initiatives. …