Proposal of Precedents Processing System for Supporting Japanese Lay Judges

We propose law professionals and amateurs supporting system for upcoming ¿lay judge system¿. The supporting system finds past cases which are similar to a target case and estimates a sentence of target case. After describing the need of such project, we carry out an preliminary experiment to extract similar judicial precedents and estimate a sentence based on features of noun words. Then we introduce our preliminary findings and possibility of tagging and using so called Nagayama criteria used by human judges.