Tag: artificial intelligence and law

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Predicting the Behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States: A General Approach (Katz, Bommarito & Blackman)

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SCOTUS Prediction Model
Abstract:  “Building upon developments in theoretical and applied machine learning, as well as the efforts of various scholars including Guimera and Sales-Pardo (2011), Ruger et al. (2004), and Martin et al. (2004), we construct a model designed to predict the voting behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States. Using the extremely randomized tree method first proposed in Geurts, et al. (2006), a method similar to the random forest approach developed in Breiman (2001), as well as novel feature engineering, we predict more than sixty years of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States (1953-2013). Using only data available prior to the date of decision, our model correctly identifies 69.7% of the Court’s overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes. Our performance is consistent with the general level of prediction offered by prior scholars. However, our model is distinctive as it is the first robust, generalized, and fully predictive model of Supreme Court voting behavior offered to date. Our model predicts six decades of behavior of thirty Justices appointed by thirteen Presidents. With a more sound methodological foundation, our results represent a major advance for the science of quantitative legal prediction and portend a range of other potential applications, such as those described in Katz (2013).”

You can access the current draft of the paper via SSRN or via the physics arXiv.  Full code is publicly available on Github.  See also the LexPredict site.  More on this to come soon …

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Call for Papers! – 15th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2015) June 8-12, 2015, at the University of San Diego School of Law

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The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2015) will be held at the University of San Diego School of Law from Monday, June 8 to Friday, June 12, 2015.

Artificial Intelligence and Law is a vibrant research field that focuses on:

  • Legal reasoning and development of computational methods of such reasoning
  • Applications of AI and other advanced information technologies that are intended to support the legal domain
  • Discovery of electronically stored information for legal applications (eDiscovery)
  • Machine learning and data mining for legal applications
  • Formal models of norms, normative systems, and norm-governed societies

Since it began in 1987, the ICAIL conference has been established as the primary international conference addressing research in Artificial Intelligence and Law.  It is organized biennially under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL). The conference proceedings are published by ACM. The journal Artificial Intelligence and Lawregularly publishes expanded versions of selected ICAIL papers.

The field serves as an excellent setting for AI researchers to demonstrate the application of their work in a rich, real-world domain. The conference also serves as a venue for researchers to showcase their work on the theoretical foundations of computational models of law. Accordingly, authors are invited to submit papers on a broad spectrum of research topics that include, but are not restricted to:

  • Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
  • Computational models of argumentation and decision making
  • Computational models of evidential reasoning
  • Legal reasoning in multi-agent systems
  • Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
  • Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
  • Automatic legal text classification and summarization
  • Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
  • Data mining applied to the legal domain
  • Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
  • E-government, e-democracy and e-justice
  • Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
  • Modeling negotiation and contract formation
  • Online dispute resolution
  • Intelligent legal tutoring systems
  • Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
  • Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems

ICAIL is keen to broaden its scope to include topics of growing importance in artificial intelligence research. Therefore, papers are invited on the following featured categories:

  • eDiscovery and eDisclosure
  • Open data, linked data, and big data
  • Machine learning
  • Argument mining

Papers will be assessed in a rigorous reviewing procedure. Standard assessment criteria for research papers will apply to all submissions (relevance, originality, significance, technical quality, evaluation, presentation). Papers proposing formal or computational models should provide examples and/or simulations that show the models’ applicability to a realistic legal problem or domain. Papers on applications should describe clearly the underlying motivations, the techniques employed, and the current state of both implementation and evaluation. All papers should make clear their relation to prior work.

  • Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 5, 2014
  • Submission of papers deadline: January 16, 2015     

Local Committee:
Richard Belew, University of California, San Diego
Karl Gruben, University of San Diego School of Law
Daniel Katz, Michigan State University College of Law
Ted Sichelman, University of San Diego School of Law
Thomas Smith, University of San Diego School of Law
Roland Vogl, Stanford Law School

Program Chair
Katie Atkinson
Department of Computer Science,
University of Liverpool, UK

Conference Chair(s)
Ted Sichelman
University of San Diego School of Law
Richard Belew
Cognitive Science Department,
University of California – San Diego

Secretary/Treasurer
Anne Gardner
Atherton, CA, USA

For More Information – Access the Full Call for Papers

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Computational Law Workshop @ Stanford Code X

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Today Mike Bommarito and I had the pleasure of participating in the Computational Law Workshop.  It was a very solid group featuring ~20 of the top global experts participating in a true workshop format about the pressing technical issues in computational law.  It was a great exchange of ideas!

 

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The Future of Law School Innovation (Conference @ColoradoLaw)

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Screen Shot 2014-04-17 at 10.35.56 AMFrom the conference announcement: “Over the last 5 years, in the fallout of the Great Recession, the legal profession has entered the era of the New Normal. Notably, a series of forces related to technological change, globalization, and the pressure to do more with less (in both corporate America and law firms) has changed permanently the legal services industry. As one article put it, firms are cutting back on hiring “in order to increase efficiency, improve profit margins, and reduce client costs.” Indeed, in its recently noted cutbacks, Weil Gotshal’s leaders remarked that it had initially expected old work to return, but came “around to the view that this is the ‘new normal.'”

The New Normal provides lawyers with an opportunity to rethink—and reimagine—the role of lawyers in our economy and society. To the extent that law firms enjoyed, or still enjoy, the ability to bundle work together, that era is coming to an end, as clients unbundle legal services and tasks. Moreover, in other cases, automation and technology can change the roles of lawyers, both requiring them to oversee processes and use technology more aggressively as well as doing less of the work that is increasingly managed by computers (think: electronic discovery). The upside is not only greater efficiencies for society, but new possibilities for legal craftsmanship.

The emerging craft of lawyering in the New Normal is likely to require lawyers to be both entrepreneurial and fluent with a range of competencies that will enable them to add value for clients. Apropos of the trends noted above, there are emerging opportunities for “legal entrepreneurs” in a range of roles from legal process management to developing technologies to manage legal operations (such as overseeing automated processes) to supporting online dispute resolution processes. In other cases, effective legal training as well as domain specific knowledge (finance, sales, IT, entrepreneurship, human resources, etc.) can form a powerful combination that prepares law school grads for a range of opportunities (business development roles, financial operations roles, HR roles, etc.). In both cases, traditional legal skills alone will not be enough to prepare law students for these roles. But the proper training, which builds on the traditional law school curriculum and goes well beyond it including practical skills, relevant domain knowledge (e.g., accounting), and professional skills (e.g., working in teams), will provide law school students a huge advantage over those with a one-dimensional skill set.”