Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 Sep 4:6:1130559.
doi: 10.3389/frai.2023.1130559. eCollection 2023.

Argumentation and explanation in the law

Antonino Rotolo  1 , Giovanni Sartor  1   2
Affiliations

Argumentation and explanation in the law

Antonino Rotolo et al. Front Artif Intell. .

Abstract

This article investigates the conceptual connection between argumentation and explanation in the law and provides a formal account of it. To do so, the methods used are conceptual analysis from legal theory and formal argumentation from AI. The contribution and results are twofold. On the one hand, we offer a critical reconstruction of the concept of legal argument, justification, and explanation of decision-making as it has been elaborated in legal theory and, above all, in AI and law. On the other hand, we propose some definitions of explanation in the context of formal legal argumentation, showing a connection between formal justification and explanation. We also investigate the notion of stable normative explanation developed elsewhere in Defeasible Logic and extend some complexity results. Our contribution is thus mainly conceptual, and it is meant to show how notions of explanation from literature on explainable AI and legal theory can be modeled in an argumentation framework with structured arguments.

Keywords: argumentation; defeasibility; explanation; justification; legal reasoning; normative systems.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

References

    1. Achinstein P. (1983). The Nature of Explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    1. Alchourron C., Bulygin E. (1971). Normative Systems. LEP Library of Exact Philosophy. Vienna: Springer. 10.1007/978-3-7091-7118-9 - DOI
    1. Aleven V., Ashley K. D. (1997). “Evaluating a learning environment for case-based argumentation skills,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL-97) (New York, NY: ACM; ), 170–179. 10.1145/261618.261650 - DOI
    1. Alexy R. (1989). A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Oxford: Clarendon.
    1. Amgoud L., Prade H. (2009). Using arguments for making and explaining decisions. Artif. Intell. 173, 413–436. 10.1016/j.artint.2008.11.006 - DOI

LinkOut - more resources