Legal Judgments Research Articles

The Rhetorical Roots of Legal Pragmatism

AbstractThis article argues that in Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s “The Path of the Law”—a landmark work in legal pragmatism—the philosophical and rhetorical themes complement and reinforce each other. To do so it utilizes Robert Danisch’s (2007)Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric as a theoretical framework to demonstrate that as Holmes confronts major tensions in the law—legality and morality, past and future, theory and practice—he reveals the necessity of pragmatism in legal judgment and its unavoidable rhetorical character.

We Don’t Become Adults, but are Told to Be Adults: The Emergence of Adultification in Japan

The long-standing debate over perceptions of children has been an aporia for centuries in Japan. Those concerned alternately view children as needing protection and guidance or as independent beings that are naturally endowed with an innate ability for self-determination. The dividing line between adult and child within the legal, political, and educational frameworks produces a similar conflict, and the line for Japanese jurisdictions was redefined in 2022. However, questions remain about the lack of data supporting this legal judgment, particularly in the juvenile justice system, and about a policy-making process that addresses an imagined "public" and disregards those most affected, i.e. the children themselves. This study analyzes the discourse surrounding the debate and interrogates the forces that deemphasize children's vulnerability.

Judicial knowledge-enhanced magnitude-aware reasoning for numerical legal judgment prediction

Judicial knowledge-enhanced magnitude-aware reasoning for numerical legal judgment prediction

"I was afraid they will be judging me and even deny me the service": Experiences of denial and dissuasion during abortion care in Ethiopia.

Disrespect and abuse are components of poor quality abortion care. This analysis aimed to understand negative experiences of care from perspectives of abortion clients in public and private facilities in Ethiopia. We conducted 23 in-depth interviews with people who obtained abortion care in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia as well as Aksum and Mekele in Tigray State, Ethiopia. The interviews were coded using a priori and emergent codes and we conducted thematic analysis to understand negative interactions with providers from participant's perspectives. Participants experienced denial of abortion services along their pathway to care and attempts by providers to dissuade them prior to providing an abortion. Underlying both the denial and the dissuasion were reports of disrespect and condemnation from providers. Participants described how providers doubted or forced them to justify their reasons for having an abortion, stigmatized them for seeking multiple abortions or later abortions, and ascribed misinformation about abortion safety. Despite reports of denial, dissuasion, and disrespect, abortion clients generally felt that providers had their best interest at heart and were grateful for having access to an abortion. Participants in Ethiopia experienced providers as gatekeepers to legal abortion services, facing disrespect and judgment at facilities where they sought care. Interventions aimed at increasing awareness of abortion laws such that clients understand their rights and values clarification interventions for providers could help reduce barriers to accessing care and improve the quality of abortion services.

Explainable machine learning multi-label classification of Spanish legal judgements

Artificial Intelligence techniques such as Machine Learning (ml) have not been exploited to their maximum potential in the legal domain. This has been partially due to the insufficient explanations they provided about their decisions. Automatic expert systems with explanatory capabilities can be specially useful when legal practitioners search jurisprudence to gather contextual knowledge for their cases. Therefore, we propose a hybrid system that applies ml for multi-label classification of judgements (sentences) and visual and natural language descriptions for explanation purposes, boosted by Natural Language Processing techniques and deep legal reasoning to identify the entities, such as the parties, involved. We are not aware of any prior work on automatic multi-label classification of legal judgements also providing natural language explanations to the end-users with comparable overall quality. Our solution achieves over 85% micro precision on a labelled data set annotated by legal experts. This endorses its interest to relieve human experts from monotonous labour-intensive legal classification tasks.

Shaken Baby Syndrome and Accidental Traumatic Brain Injury: Characteristics and Effects on Legal Judgment

Purpose: This study aimed to establish the medical evidence of abuse by comparing the clinical differences between children with shaken baby syndrome (SBS) who had no signs of trauma and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Methods: Children aged <5 years with intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) were divided into SBS group and TBI group, which was developed because of intentional or accidental trauma including physical violence. We investigated clinical characteristics, ICH and brain injury patterns, funduscopic examinations, and the legal consequences for guardians. Results: Compared to TBI, children with SBS had a higher incidence of neurological symptoms, including seizures (80.0% vs. 15.4%, P=0.001) and mental changes (73.3% vs. 32.5%, P=0.003); they also had a longer time to hospitalization (SBS, 21.8±30.4 hours; TBI, 9.5±21.3 hours; P=0.046). The rate of bilateral ICH was significantly higher in the SBS group (73.3% vs. 19.0%, P=0.001). In the TBI group, the incidence of epidural hemorrhage (EDH) and subdural hemorrhage was equal (42.3%), but EDH was not seen in the SBS group. Multistage ICH (58.3%) and diffusion-limiting lesions (75.0%) were common in SBS, with high mortality and neurological sequelae (86.7%). Nevertheless, only a few guardians (13.3%) were separated from the victim and only one person (6.7%) who confessed to abuse was detained. Conclusion: Children with SBS who have never been affected to external physical forces can have multistage and bilateral ICH with severe brain damage, which is clinically different from TBI. Our data suggest that adequate protection and active legal actions are required in order to protect children who had sufficient characteristics of SBS.

Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Decision-Making Method for Legal Judgment Based on Deep Neural Network

With the arrival of the third revolution of artificial intelligence, the applications of artificial intelligence in the fields of automatic driving, image recognition, smart home, machine translation, medical services, e-sports, and so on can be seen everywhere, and topics about artificial intelligence are constantly emerging. Since 2017, the discussion on artificial intelligence in the field of law has become more and more active. In this context, the application of artificial intelligence in the field of legal judgment and the hypothetical system based on this technology in court judgment has also become the object of discussion from time to time. In this paper, based on the artificial intelligence decision-making method of the deep neural network, aiming at the three subtasks of legal judgment prediction, namely, crime prediction, law recommendation, and sentence prediction, a multi-task judgment prediction model BERT12multi and a sentence interval prediction model BERT-Text CNN are proposed, which improve the prediction accuracy and adopt the knowledge distillation strategy to compress the model parameters and improve the reasoning speed of the judgment model. Experiments on the CAIL2018 data set show that the performance of the deep neural network model in crime prediction and law recommendation tasks can be significantly improved by adopting the pre training model adaptive training, grouping focus loss, and gradient confrontation training strategies. Using a step-by-step sentence prediction strategy can realize the weight sharing of pre training model and make use of the prediction results of charges and laws in sentence prediction. The recall training-prediction strategy can avoid error accumulation and improve the accuracy of sentence prediction. By integrating the artificial intelligence decision-making method, the case reasoning speed can be greatly improved, the highest compressible model volume can be about 11% of the original one, and the reasoning speed can be increased by about 8 times. At the same time, performance close to that of the deep neural model can be obtained, which is superior to other legal decision prediction models based on word embedding.

(In)visible powers: witnessing the ‘tourist-waters’ of Nämforsen

This artistic research reflection explores Sweden’s legally-mandated ‘tourist-release’ at the Ångermanälven River’s storied site of Nämforsen. Against World Wars and calls for energy independence of the mid 1940s, the iconic Ångermanälven River was industrialised from a free-flowing salmon river to eventually a series of 44 dams and hydropower plants. Later, a unique environmental court legal judgement resulted in ‘tourist-water’ at Nämforsen that gives the illusion of a free-flowing river during summer months. Existing for solely aesthetic purposes, tourist-water is an unexplored example of the (in)visible powers perpetuating myths associated with hydropower and place in Sweden. Through text and images, this piece reflects on witnessing this tourist-water phenomena through place-based documentary arts practice. The fieldwork is part of a doctoral project in artistic practice focusing on how photography can mediate complex issues in places of environmental change through the case of Nämforsen. Strategies such as framing, time-scaling and montage have emerged from this practice at the same time as ethical concerns related to representation are raised. This case is especially pertinent as hydropower in Sweden comes under increased scrutiny, simultaneously as it is marketed as a sustainable energy solution. The piece furthermore highlights the lasting implications of conservation efforts centred historically on aesthetic rather than ecologic values.

‘A Knife into My Heart’: Cries, Compassion and Ethical Life

The subtitle to the conference upon which this journal issue is based invited us to ‘follow Crowter’. This paper does so primarily by following the person and only thereby attends to the legal judgment. In particular, it will attend to her comment that When mum told me about the discrimination against babies like me in the womb, I felt like a knife had been put into my heart. It made me feel less valued than other people. The argument is that (I) there are strong reasons for such an approach from the field of theological ethics and that this is valuable for pastoral theology and for bioethics. With this case made, the argument proceeds (II) by following and building on three elements of Heidi Crowter’s words concerning (a) the knife (b) the heart and (c) the person. The argument concludes (III) with theological reflection and deliberation regarding institutions, practices and actions which will make for ‘ethical society’, principally focussed on ecclesial life.

Facial recognition technologies in human resources: Uses and challenges

The face is the index of the mind. It is commonly said that the face reveals one’s emotions. Facial expressions convey feelings and reaction to any given situation. The application of technology in this field has influenced decisions in legal judgements, policy decisions, education, security and medicine and in almost all other social interactions. In this article, we go through the concept of facial recognition technology (FRT, and its application – not just for invading one’s privacy but to check on its authenticity too). The application of this technology, and the possibility of technological bias that perpetuates the human bias, is the core issue to be solved in this case. 1. Does the expression of the face depict and portray real emotions of an individual? 2. When emotions like anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise are not expressed explicitly on the face for various reasons, does it limit the performance of this technology?

Fairness Measures of Machine Learning Models in Judicial Penalty Prediction

<p>Machine learning (ML) has been widely adopted in many software applications across domains. However, accompanying the outstanding performance, the behaviors of the ML models, which are essentially a kind of black-box software, could be unfair and hard to understand in many cases. In our human-centered society, an unfair decision could potentially damage human value, even causing severe social consequences, especially in decision-critical scenarios such as legal judgment. Although some existing works investigated the ML models in terms of robustness, accuracy, security, privacy, quality, etc., the study on the fairness of ML is still in the early stage. In this paper, we first proposed a set of fairness metrics for ML models from different perspectives. Based on this, we performed a comparative study on the fairness of existing widely used classic ML and deep learning models in the domain of real-world judicial judgments. The experiment results reveal that the current state-of-the-art ML models could still raise concerns for unfair decision-making. The ML models with high accuracy and fairness are urgently demanding.</p> <p> </p>

The limits of the law: Aboriginal rights in the Canadian constitution

It has been forty years since Aboriginal rights were enshrined in the Canadian constitution. We have seen the recognition of First Nations claims to unceded land, the negotiation of self-government agreements, and the rise of Indigenous leadership across Canada. We have also seen communities without clean water, the arrests of First Nation activists protesting pipeline developments, and the continued social and economic struggles of First Nation peoples across the country. It seems, therefore, that this might be an appropriate moment for a reflection on the last forty years of Aboriginal rights in the Canadian constitution. As such, this article examines the key legal judgements in Canadian jurisprudence to reflect on how the entrenchment of Aboriginal rights has legally affected First Nations in Canada, and question whether we have reached the limits of these decisions. The article is followed by a bibliography of key literature on First Nations rights and the constitution.

Legal Text Mining Using Legal Judgements

Abstract: Rapid advancements in digital data acquisition techniques have led to massive amounts of data. Above 80 percent of today’s data is composed of unstructured or semi-structured data. The discovery of appropriate patterns and trends to analyse the text documents from massive volume of data is a big issue. Thus, text mining is believed to have high commercial value. Text mining is the process of extracting useful patterns from text data which plays an effective role in decision making task. Here, we will use the legal judgements as the input document then we will apply cosine similarity method to see which judgements are similar and finally we will develop a web application in which the user can search for a particular judgement.

Legality of application of the provisions of Chapter 17 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine in order to block websites in criminal proceedings

The purpose of the study is to analyze the case law on blocking websites in criminal proceedings and find the right way to solve this gap in legislation, by arresting in accordance with Chapter 17 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, creating conditions for improving criminal procedural law to clearly define the mechanism of blocking websites and formulate appropriate proposals for amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine. Research methods were used to achieve this goal, in the process of scientific research used various methods of scientific knowledge. The methodological basis of scientific work were general scientific methods: theoretical (analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction, systems analysis), as well as empirical research methods, for example, conducting expert evaluation and other methods. Results: the case law on blocking websites in criminal proceedings is analyzed and attention is drawn to the lack of a clear mechanism for restricting access to websites within criminal proceedings. This shows a big problem for making legal judgments. It was concluded that the current version of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine could not be used to block websites. Emphasis is placed on the impossibility of recognizing a web- site as material evidence in criminal proceedings, as this contradicts the legal definition of physical evidence as a material object. The references in the motions of the pre-trial investigation bodies and the decisions of the investigating judges to the fact that the users of the website may have intellectual property rights, as it contradicts the norms of civil law, are considered unfounded. It is proposed to supplement part ten of Article 170 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine with a new object that can be seized - a website.

578 Is the Scope of the Physician's Duty to Warn the Patient About the Risks Associated with a Surgery Sufficiently Clear?

Abstract Aim To critically analyze the concepts and cases that led to the seminal rulings in Montgomery and Sidaway Method A medical and legal literature review was performed. Case history was identified and critically analysed to understand the progression of consent law in England. Results The physician's duty to warn the patient about the risk associated with medical intervention has been developed through the cases identified to involve: The process of consent is of chief importance in surgery and yet only a single case (Chester) directly involves consenting during a surgical procedure. Conclusion The definition of material risk is expected to cover a plethora of medical interventions from minor procedures to major surgery. It was generated predominantly from non-surgical cases. The physician's scope to disclose risks to patients is broad and encompasses a skillset that incites core clinical skills of empathy, honesty, and information transfer. It has evolved alongside advances in medical and legal judgement, albeit reactively to cases of inadequate care. With regard to its clarity, one has to consider the acceptable boundary of prescriptivism that both respects patient autonomy and creates a transparent working environment. It can be argued that the current scope is not direct enough for healthcare professionals.

Study of Deep Learning-Based Legal Judgment Prediction in Internet of Things Era.

Legal judgment prediction is the most typical application of artificial intelligence technology, especially natural language processing methods, in the judicial field. In a practical environment, the performance of algorithms is often restricted by the computing resource conditions due to the uneven computing performance of the devices. Reducing the computational resource consumption of the model and improving the inference speed can effectively reduce the deployment difficulty of the legal judgment prediction model. To improve the prediction accuracy, enhance the model inference speed, and reduce the model memory consumption, we propose a BERT knowledge distillation-based legal decision prediction model, called KD-BERT. To reduce the resource consumption in the model inference process, we use the BERT pretraining model with lower memory requirements to be the encoder. Then, the knowledge distillation strategy transfers the knowledge to the student model of the shallow transformer structure. Experiment results show that the proposed KD-BERT has the highest F1-score compared with traditional BERT models. Its inference speed is also much faster than the other BERT models.

Consent in organ transplantation: putting legal obligations and guidelines into practice

Consent in medical practice is a process riddled with layers of complexities. To some extent, this is inevitable given that different medical conditions raise different sets of issues for doctors and patients. Informed consent and risk assessment are highly significant public health issues that have become even more prominent during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article we identity relevant factors for clinicians to consider when ensuring consent for solid organ transplantation. Consent to undergo solid organ transplantation is more complex than most surgical and other clinical interventions because of the many factors involved, the complexity of the options and the need to balance competing risks. We first out the context in which consent is given by the patient. We then outline the legal principles pertaining to consent in medical practice as it applies in the UK and the implication of recent legal judgments. The third section highlights specific complexities of consent in organ transplantation and identifies relevant factors in determining consent for organ transplantation. The fourth section offers practical recommendations. We propose a novel ‘multi-factor approach’ to informed consent in transplantation which includes understanding risk, effective communication, and robust review processes. Whilst understanding risk and communication are a given, our suggestion is that including review processes into the consent process is essential. By this we specifically mean identifying and creating room for discretion in decision-making to better ensure that informed consent is given in practice. Discretion implies that health care professionals use their judgement to use the legal judgements as guidance rather than prescriptive. Discretion is further defined by identifying the relevant options and scope of clinical and personal factors in specified transplantation decisions. In particular, we also highlight the need to pay attention to the institutional dimension in the consent process. To that end, our recommendations identify a gap in the current approaches to consent. The identification of areas of discretion in decision-making processes is essential for determining when patients need to be involved. In other words, clinicians and healthcare professionals need to consider carefully when there is room for direction and where there is little or no room for exercising discretion. In sum, our proposed approach is a modest contribution to the on-going debate about consent in medicine.

A trend of Medical Negligence in Laser Therapy in the Capital City: A Nine-Year Survey.

Introduction: The purpose of the present study is to investigate the common causes of injuries, claims, and decisions related to laser therapy medical malpractice during a nine-year survey. Methods: The legal documents in the Coroner's Office of Forensic Medicine were investigated in a national database from 2012 to 2020 in Tehran, Iran. The frequency and nature of the cases, including the year of litigation, the location and certificate of the provider, the injury sustained, and the cause of legal action and judgment were collected. Results: Three hundred and eighty-three cases related to injury from laser therapy were registered in the coroner's Office of Forensic Medicine during the study period. The incidence of litigation related to laser surgery showed an increasing trend, with a peak occurrence in 2020. Laser hair removal was the most common (51.2%) litigated procedure. General practice operators (48%) recorded the highest rate of laser-related medical complaints. Lack of skill was the most common reason for failure. Among 383 cases with public decisions, 62.4% of them were fault liability in paid judgment. Conclusion: Medical claims related to laser application are increasing. However, as it is clear, the growth of laser technology and the increasing demand for lasers in medical science require more surveillance to avoid probable injuries and improve patient safety, especially surveillance of the physicians who work outside the scope of their specialty.

Human Rights and Christian Values in a Digital Society. Selected Issues

The subject of this study is the analysis of the contact between Christian values and human rights or the concept of human rights in the context of the dynamic development of IT technology and the shaping of not only global but digital society. The new organization of society is characterized by a multiplicity of value systems which interpenetrate each other. In the area of Western culture, the human rights system occupies a central place, which has become a kind of new decalogue. The aim of this study is an attempt to define the place of traditional Christian values in a digital society. The research hypothesis was the statement that Christian values are not only timeless, but also universal and perfectly fit into the functioning of the digital society. The study uses the method of legal and dogmatic analysis of legal provisions and judgments as well as the analysis of cases of conflicts between Christian values and human rights. In my conclusions, I state that the confrontation of these two systems of values leads to the need to rebuild the organization of Christians. An ideal model may be the diaspora life of people who not only preach but also practice these values.

Research on a Decision Prediction Method Based on Causal Inference and a Multi-Expert FTOPJUDGE Mechanism

Legal judgement prediction (LJP) is a crucial part of legal AI, and its goal is to predict the outcome of a case based on the information in the description of criminal facts. This paper proposes a decision prediction method based on causal inference and a multi-expert FTOPJUDGE mechanism. First, a causal inference algorithm was adopted to process unstructured text. This process did not require very much manual intervention to better mine the information in the text. Then, a neural network dedicated to each task was set up, and a neural network that simultaneously served multiple tasks was also set up. Finally, the pre-trained language model Lawformer was used to provide knowledge for downstream tasks. By using the public data set CAIL2018 and comparing it with current mainstream decision prediction models, it was shown that the model significantly improved the performance of downstream tasks and achieved great improvements in multiple indicators. Through ablation experiments, the effectiveness and rationality of each module of the proposed model were verified. The method proposed in this study achieved reasonably good performance in legal judgment prediction, which provides a promising solution for legal judgment prediction.