Legal knowledge

The development of intelligent legal information processing systems depends critically on availability of representations of legal knowledge. Some of the application areas envisioned for intelligent legal systems include retrieval systems, argument and reasoning systems, legal decision-making systems, and drafting systems. Successful implementation of systems of these types has been hampered by a lack of adequate knowledge representation for the underlying legal concepts. We need both representations of everyday situations and of subtle legal concepts like rights, duties, and contracts. This paper reviews some of the recent work in representing legal situations and discusses the special knowledge representation questions that arise in developing legal information processing systems. We concentrate on computational aspects of Hohfeldian concepts of rights and duties, deontic logic, representation of legal arguments, and the semantics of legal relations.