Download Special Issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law in Honor of Carole

Special Issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law in Honor of Carole Hafner: call for
papers
Earlier this year, Carole Hafner, a key figure in the origin and development of AI and Law,
died. A tribute to Carole can be found at http://www.iaail.org/?q=page/memorials. A
special issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law (which she co-founded) will be published in
2016, focusing on Carole’s main research topics: semantic retrieval and the procedural,
temporal and teleological aspects of reasoning with legal cases.
In her long academic career, Carole Hafner made contributions in a number of areas of AI
and Law. Her 1978 Ph.D. dissertation was a pioneering effort in semantic information
retrieval of legal cases; ahead of its time, it supplied what would now be called ontologies
for describing case law domains and cases, a retrieval language, and methods for retrieving,
from a corpus of a hundred cases, cases providing: examples of which a specified concept is
(or is not) true, criteria for knowing that the concept does (or does not) hold, or the
consequences of the presence or absence of the concept in a particular case. Today,
developments in technology have transformed the possibilities for information and case
retrieval, and opened up rich possibilities to address the issues which motivated Carole.
Perhaps her most significant contributions were her triptych of papers written with Don
Berman published in the 1991, 1993 and 1995 ICAIL conferences and consolidated in an AI
and Law journal paper (Hafner and Berman 2002). All three of these papers dealt with
various limitations of factor based reasoning. The 1991 paper (Berman and Hafner 1991)
called for more account to be taken of the procedural context. The 1993 paper (Berman
and Hafner 1993) discussed the need for consideration to be given to the social purposes of
laws and legal decisions and the 1995 paper (Berman and Hafner 1995) recognized the
dynamic nature of case law, and suggested that it was essential to be aware of the
possibility that a current consensus was breaking down and a landmark case was coming.
Factor based reasoning remains a very popular way of looking at reasoning with cases in AI
and Law, and these papers are as relevant today as they were when they were first written.
Although it is the second of these papers which has received by far the most attention of
the three, all of them discuss issues that still demand attention.
We therefore invite contributions to a special issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law
intended to revisit these aspects of conceptual case information retrieval or of reasoning
with legal cases and the contribution of these papers. While contributions on any or all of
the papers are welcome, we particularly seek contributions on the procedural and
temporal aspects of case based reasoning, which we regard as unduly neglected. All
contributions should clearly demonstrate their connection with Carole’s work. The editor
of the special issue will be Trevor Bench-Capon, and all papers will go through the standard
review process for this journal.
Contributions, which should be submitted through the Journal’s site at
http://www.editorialmanager.com/arti/default.aspx and copied to Trevor Bench-Capon
([email protected]), should be received by 31st May 2016, and notification of acceptance will
be by the end of July 2016 with a view to the special issue appearing as the last issue of
2016.
References
Carole D. Hafner and Donald H. Berman: The role of context in case-based legal reasoning:
teleological, temporal, and procedural. Artificial Intelligence and Law 10(1-3): 19-64
(2002)
Donald H. Berman, Carole D. Hafner: Incorporating Procedural Context into a Model of
Case-based Legal Reasoning. ICAIL 1991: 12-20
Donald H. Berman, Carole D. Hafner: Representing Teleological Structure in Case-based
Legal Reasoning: The Missing Link. ICAIL 1993: 50-59
Donald H. Berman, Carole D. Hafner: Understanding Precedents in a Temporal Context of
Evolving Legal Doctrine. ICAIL 1995: 42-51
Carole D. Hafner: An Information Retrieval System Based on a Computer Model of Legal
Knowledge. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981.
Carole D. Hafner: Conceptual Organization of Case Law Knowledge Bases. ICAIL 1987: 3542.
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