The 12th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2009) will be held in Barcelona (Spain), June 8-12, 2009, under the auspices of the IAAIL. The paper submission deadline is January 11, 2009. A special author mentoring program is offered for younger authors who have not published at ICAIL previously (deadline November 4, 2008). For more information about the conference please visit the conference website.

The First International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law (RELAW 2008) will be held in Barcelona (Spain), September 9, 2008, in conjunction with the 16th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (submission deadline July 4, 2008.) Read More...

The 21st International JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems will be held in Florence, Italy, from 10-13 December 2008. The Call for Papers is now available (submission deadline Sept 1st).

The Second International Workshop on Supporting Search and Sensemaking for Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings (DESI II) will take place Wednesday, June 25, 2008, at University College London, in the United Kingdom. See the Call for Papers for further information.

The Second International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2008) will take place June 10, 2008 at the Asahikawa Convention Bureau, in Hokkaido, Japan. See the Call for Papers for further information.

Research in AI and Law has, throughout its history, produced a variety of approaches by which legal cases can be modelled.  These approaches support different styles of reasoning for a variety of problem-solving contexts, such as decision-making, information retrieval, teaching, etc.  Particular legal cases that have received wide coverage in the AI and Law literature include: the infamous property law case of Pierson v. Post (see e.g. Berman and Hafner, ICAIL 1993; Gordon and Walton, COMMA 2006); other cases involving the capture of wild animals such as Young v. Hitchens and Keeble v. Hickeringill (see e.g. Berman and Hafner, ICAIL 1993; Bench-Capon and Rissland, JURIX 2001); US trade secrets cases such as Mason v. Jack Daniel Distillery (see e.g. Aleven and Ashley, ICAIL 1997); and, criminal cases such as the Rijkbloem case (see e.g. Bex et. al, ICAIL 2007). The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum in which researchers can present their own particular approach used for modelling such legal cases, with a view to considering the relative merits of the individual approaches.

See the Call for Papers for further information.

ICAIL 2007 will take place at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, from June 4 to June 8, 2007. See the Call for Papers for further information.

Argumentation has evolved from its original study primarily by philosophers to emerge in the last ten years as an important sub-discipline of Artificial Intelligence. Among the significant contributions resulting have been approaches to modelling and analysis of defeasible reasoning, formal bases for negotiation and dialogue processes in multiagent systems, and the use of argumentation theory in A.I. applications whose nature is not best described through traditional logics, e.g. legal reasoning, evaluation of conflicting beliefs, etc. The process of interpreting and and exploiting classical treatments of Argumentation Theory in effective computational terms has led to a rich interchange of ideas among researchers from diverse disciplines such as Philosophy, Linguistics, A.I. and Economics.

Argumentation related workshops are now well-established events at the major Artificial Intelligence related Conferences, e.g. the workshop series on Computational Models of Natural Argument held in conjunction with IJCAI and ECAI, and the series of ArgMAS workshops held in conjunction with AAMAS.

While work over the past five years has done much to consolidate diverse contributions to the field, many new concerns have been identified and form the basis of current research. Among such concerns are: approaches to coping with intractability issues; representation of argument structures in multiagent system settings; developing robust treatments of dynamically evolving argumentation frameworks; semantics for capturing concepts such as "persuasiveness", "credibility" and "impact" of arguments; computational bases for distinguishing classes of ``acceptable'' arguments, etc.

This special issue of Artificial Intelligence Journal on the theme of Argumentation in A.I., is intended to present the current state-of-the-art in argumentation to a general audience, thus increasing awareness of the possibilities that argumentation offers among specialists in areas of A.I. which have not yet considered this as a way of addressing their problems. Equally it will present opportunities for those not currently involved with argumentation to consider new perspectives from which to tackle problems. In sum, the special issue aims both to spread the dissemination of argumentation ideas, and to widen the boundaries of the argumentation community.

More Information

The Call for Papers for the the 19th International JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held in Paris (France) from 7-9 December 2006, has been published.