Legal Interpretation by Computer: A Survey of Interpretive Rules

This article presents a survey of legal interpretive rules. The rules presented in this survey are used as the rule base in the computer program accompanying this article, an expert system. The computer program models legal decision-making and uses the rules presented to make legal decisions, generating a report to justify the decision reached. Legal interpretation is chosen as a model for computation representation because understanding interpretive methods is useful for any jurist seeking creative arguments. This survey of legal interpretive rules is of both a theoretical and practical interest