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This article describes an argumentation shell to support the formulation, representation and drafting of legal arguments. The shell can be used to capture generic arguments in many legal domains as well as to assist decision-makers in constructing their own actual arguments. The shell demonstrates that knowledge represented using the generic/actual argument model (GAAM) (a variant of Toulmin's argument structure) can be used to: (a) support the development of complex arguments, (b) add context and increase specificity for the retrieval of relevant documents, (c) incorporate background knowledge, (d) assist in the drafting of documents that represent arguments made, and (e) provide a structure for complex inferences requiring a range of mechanisms. The shell can be used to support decision making in a range of legal domains, including discretionary domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Knowledge Discovery from Databases (KDD) technique called 'association rules' is applied to a large data set representing applicants for government-funded legal aid. Results indicate that KDD can be an invaluable tool for legal analysts. Association rules discovered identify associations between variables that are present in the data set though are not necessarily causal. Interesting rules can prompt analysts to formulate hypotheses for further investigation. The identification of interesting rules is typically performed using an objective measure of 'interesting' although this measure is often not sufficiently accurate to eliminate all uninteresting rules. In this article, a subjective measure of interestingness is adopted in conjunction with the objective measures. This leads to the ability to focus more accurately on those rules that surprise the analyst and are therefore more likely to be interesting. In general, KDD techniques have not been applied to law despite possible benefits because data is often stored in narrative form rather than in structured databases. However, the impending introduction of data warehouses that collect data from a number of organizations across a legal system presents invaluable opportunities for analysts using KDD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge-based systems can make a contribution to the difficult problem of regulating copyright on the internet. Regulation with law alone presents significant jurisdictional and enforcement difficulties whereas regulation with the use of encryption has the effect of removing legitimate public access to works for research, private study or criticism. Knowledge-based systems proposed here operate at five junctures: creating works, uploading works to a network, transmitting the work across the internet, downloading a work and using the creation. For each system, we apply an agent-based architecture that defines the actors, the knowledge all agents share about the world and a protocol, based on Habermasian speech acts to interact with other agents. The shared knowledge, and beliefs about the world, that each agent holds is represented with the use of arguments at two levels, the generic and the actual argument level. This application of argumentation extends our previous work in family law and refugee law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]