Workshop on Models of Legal Reasoning

[Renata Wassermann]

The 1st Workshop on Models of Legal Reasoning (MLR 2020)

Co-located with KR 2020, September 12-18, 2020 - Rhodes, Greece

The MLR workshop aims to bring together researchers from different domains — AI&Law experts, legal and moral philosophers and computer scientists — who are active in the fields of belief revision, ontologies and formal models of argumentation, formal ethics and analytic legal theory. Its objective: to explore methods for the representation of legal reasoning, with a special focus on the formalization of legal and ethical systems, the representation of legal interpretation or argumentation about rules and precedents.

Within the legal artificial intelligence community, knowledge representation approaches have been used to leverage expert knowledge for the construction of formal structures that model legal reasoning. The application of those logics, and the knowledge representation structures needed for their operation, still face the challenge of how to properly represent legal interpretation and balance values and goals. From a theoretical standpoint, these aspects of legal and ethical reasoning require richer models of knowledge representation and reasoning. From a more practical point of view, the application of existing legal reasoning systems to real contexts requires substantial pre-processing efforts for extracting the necessary knowledge from judicial text data, a difficulty that suggests the potential benefits from the use of natural language processing approaches for automated mining of arguments and relevant factors. 

Topics

Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

• Normative Change in legal and ethical reasoning;
• Argumentation-based approaches to legal interpretation;
• Legal and ethical reasoning with goals;
• Defeasible approaches to legal reasoning;
• Formal approaches to ethics;
• Case-based reasoning;
• Formal models of statutory interpretation;
• Mining elements of legal reasoning from legal texts;
• Normative Systems
• Logical issues related to legal interpretation;
• Methodologies of legal interpretation.

We welcome and encourage the submission of high quality, original papers (up to 9 pages), which are not simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere. For more details, see our website: https://lawgorithm.com.br/en/mlr-2020/

Schedule

Given the massive COVID-19 related changes, it is not clear what the situation will be like in September. As of now, the KR’20 organizers are not committed to making drastic changes to the schedule of KR’20, but any changes will be informed via the workshop website.

– Workshops paper submission deadline: 8 June 2020.
– Workshops paper notification: 13 July 2020.
– Tutorial and workshop dates: 12-14 September 2020. 

Organising Committee

Juliano Maranhão, University of São Paulo
Giovanni Sartor, University of Bologna and European University Institute
Gabriella Pigozzi, Université Paris-Dauphiné

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Renata Wassermann
Associate Professor
Computer Science Department
University of São Paulo