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The careful reader will have noticed that there have been an unusually
large number of examples drawn from the legal domain. There are a number
of things it can teach us about general principals of FOA [REF398] . The Common Law tradition is
very old, and has been connected to an organized corpus of documents in
free text for a very long time. As the Doonesbury cartoon (part of Gary
Trudeau's Bicentennial series) in Figure (figure) suggests,
legal documents help to demonstrate just how long prose can live beyond
its drafting. Hafner was one of the first to recognize this, manually
representing a wide range of attributes for a small number of documents
in the legal domain [REF131] . This
work has now become a part of a larger effort within AI to model the
legal reasoning process (e.g., reasoning by analogy [Ashley90] ). Here we are most concerned
with what can we learn from lawyers who have FOA the Law which might
generalizes to other corpora and searchers.
First, the fact that judicial
opinions have been written for so long and in such a particular
``voice'' has meant that it is also possibel to consider special
linguistic characteristics of this legal genre [Goodrich87] [Levi82] .
Second, notions of citation are
especially well-used within this corpus. Simple concepts like impact
have been described [REF1074] , and
theories of legal citation proposed [REF128] [REF1069] [REF1071] . Obviously, manipulation of
access to the legal printed record (for example by controlling which
judges' opinions are made available!) has enormous political
ramifications [Brenner92] . This
become even more true as recent consolidation of the media industry
means that one or two corporations effectively control the entire
process of legal publication.
Third, the backbone of the legal process is
an adversarial argument. This dialectic is often explicit, for example
as marked by the { cf., but cf.} citation conventions (cf. Section §6.1 ). The presense of such syntactic
marker makes it conceivable to analyze polazrization across an entire
legal literature. Of course the arguments contained in briefs and
opinions contain a great deal more structure than simple opposition. The
analysis of legal ARGUMENT STRUCTURES , in conjunction with the
textual foundations of Common Law, is perhaps the most important feature
of the legal domain to FOA. One the one hand, it is possible to model
individual documents and their {\em logical} features so as to reason
about them [REF131] [REF124] . Special DEONTIC LOGICS
have been developed especially to deal with the concepts of ``rights''
and ``obligations'' that are at the heart of many legal relations [REF730] .
{Statistical} analyses of large
document corpora may seem contrary to {\em logical} analyses of the
arguments contained in each of them, and in fact this chasm runs very
deep. Not only does it suggest quite different technology bases from the
arsenal of (roughly inductive vs. deductive) AI techniques, but reflects
a tension within the law itself. Rose [REF1113] refers to a spectrum of legal
philosophies ranging from ``formalism'' to ``realism.'' On the one hand,
many legal documents certainly seem to function logically, with careful
definitions and reasoning that Langdell [Langdell87] has idealized as
``mechanical jurisprudence.'' At the same time analyses such as the
Critical Legal Studies [Unger83] have
helped to demonstrate that the Law is just another social process.
It is
exactly this dual nature of the Law and hence legal texts that make it
especially interesting as an example of FOA [Nerhot91] . Individual applications
include LITIGATION SUPPORT systems which allow lawyers to search
through the truckloads of documents involved in extended trials. On a
much larger scale, systems like West Group's WestLaw and Reed Elsevier's LEXIS systems provide access to the bulk
of statuatory and case law to all practicing lawyers [REF1064] [REF733] .
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