Spreadsheets for Legal Reasoning: The Continued Promise of Declarative Logic Programming in Law

Abstract

The legal services market is one in which there is too much demand, and too little supply. One method of increasing supply in a market is to increase efficiency by automating. Automated legal services require the automation of legal reasoning. Declarative logic programming (DLP) has long been recognized as well-suited to the automation of legal reasoning. This dissertation reviews the legal academic literature surrounding the automation of legal services using DLP, which has been discussed primarily with regard to how it can be used to build “expert systems”. This dissertation argues that most of the criticisms of the use of expert systems for automating legal services can be addressed by using modern DLP technologies, conceiving of the encoding as being representative of an interpretation of the law rather than the law’s correct meaning, and increasing ease-of-use for non-programmers. The dissertation then proposes a set of 7 criteria of suitability for DLP tools developed from a legal services automation perspective. A survey of available tools is performed, comparing the available tools to these criteria. The dissertation advocates for the development of open source DLP tools that have both accessibility features (ease of use and price), and at least one of the five technical features. The dissertation concludes with the description of an opensource tool developed by the author as an ABA Innovation Fellowship project, which is open-source, free, aims to be easy to use, and implements case-based reasoning to allow users to automate reasoning around open-textured legal concepts.