Legal reasoning methodology: The missing link

Abstract

Abstract The biggest false assumption made when attempting to model automatically acquired legal knowledge is that methodological and procedural legal knowledge is also contained in the text of law. Although the legal profession Intuitively knows the falsity of this assumption, researchers in the area of automatic knowledge acquisition are still confident in implementing systems that use only the text of laws as their main source of knowledge. Knowledge engineers are then forced to make their own interpretations of this knowledge, thus resulting in erroneous and legally unacceptable interpretations of the law. The aim of Nomos (an EC supported project under the ESPRIT II initiative) was to assist the knowledge engineer by providing tools that perform semiautomatic knowledge acquisition from legal texts in Italian and French. This paper uses the implementation of Nomos‐advisor, a legal expert system that uses Nomos's results as an input, as a proof of the falsity of the above assumption and discusses possi...