Abstract
Abstract Legal reasoning, the core of legal practice in many countries, is “stare decisis” and its soundness is usually strengthened by relevant case law consulted. However, the task of relevant case law access and retrieval is tiring to legal practitioners and constitutes a serious drain on their productivity. Existing efforts at addressing this problem are conceptional, restrictive or unreliable. Specifically, existing semantic retrieval (SR) systems for case law are desirous of exceptional retrieval precision. Ontology promises to meet this desire, if introduced to the SR system. As a consequence, an ontology-based SR system for case law has been built using the systems analysis and design methodology. In particular, the component-based software engineering and the agile methodologies are employed to implement the system. Finally, the search and retrieval performance of the resultant SR system has been evaluated using the heuristics evaluation method. The retrieval system has shown to have a search and retrieval performance of about 94 % precision, 80 % recall and 84 % F-measure. Overall, the paper implements the SR system for case law with excellent precision and affirms the superiority of ontology approach over other semantic approaches to SR systems for document retrieval in the legal domain.
Highlights
Law has remained an indispensable part of man and every society, and organisation has become a product of law but is intrinsically and intricately operated by it
The task of relevant case law access and retrieval is tiring to legal practitioners and constitutes a serious drain on their productivity
Using a Component-based Development (CBD) approach, it is important to note that much implementation effort in system development is no longer necessary, but effort is shifted to dealing with components, locating the components, selecting the components that are most appropriate for a specific task, integrating and testing the components [31]
Summary
Law has remained an indispensable part of man and every society, and organisation has become a product of law but is intrinsically and intricately operated by it. Codifying legal expert’s know-how is salutary but the adoption of its resultant systems will be seriously threatened by the nature of law and the legal practice [5], [19]. Exercising discretion in the legal profession is not an easy task because it is strongly dependent on plain wisdom, experience, contextual and socio-political influences [2]–[6]; and these factors are diverse and vary widely across people, culture and time in history. This may bring the systems that codify legal expert’s know-how to infamy
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