An inquiry into the development of expert systems in legal reasoning

The first goal of this paper is to review some of the steps necessary in developing a system that reasons effectively in some domain of law. The paper will begin by addressing the issues of domain selection, domain analysis and knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, and selection of an inference method. After presenting a brief argument against using rule-based reasoning as the primary mode of inference, the paper will go on to expound the virtues of Kevin Ashley\u27s HYPO, a software model of case based legal argument. It will conclude with a short description of my experience implementing part of a software model of legal reasoning