Conference Announcement: Graphic and
Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings Cardozo
Law School New
York City (Manhattan) January
28-29, 2007
Description of conference: One of the largest problems faced by crime investigators, litigators,
paralegals, judges, triers of fact, and other actors interested in disputes
about factual questions in legal settings is the sheer mass of available
evidence in many cases. It is often difficult to remember, retrieve, and
interpret evidential information, so that patterns, relations, and
inconsistencies often go unnoticed. Tools that support the storage, retrieval,
and interpretation of masses of evidence could therefore be of great use. Psychological studies have shown that people's ability to remember,
retrieve, and interpret information is greatly enhanced if they organize
information in a way that is meaningful to them. Scholars of the law of
evidence have long suggested that graphical representations of evidential
arguments and inferences could support
humans in making sense of masses of evidence. As early as 1913, John Henry
Wigmore claimed that his charting method promoted rational thinking about legal
evidence. While Wigmore had only pencil and paper to draw his cumbersome graphs,
today the computer could make his ideas practically feasible for everyone.
Software could be used to draw graphical representations of arguments and
inferences about masses of evidence. Moreover, such software could be combined
with existing database, document management, and search technology so that
collections of evidentiary documents could be stored and retrieved in terms of
the user’s thinking about a case. Such software would also facilitate transfer
of case files to others by increasing the transparency of the files, so that
subsequent investigators, prosecutors, and fact finders could gain a quicker
and better understanding of the case. Such software is currently being investigated for use in various
domains. Argument visualization software has been designed, for instance, to
support the teaching of scientific reasoning or critical thinking skills
(Belvedere, Reasonable, Araucaria, Convince Me), to support intelligence
analysis, and to facilitate individual or collaborative problem solving
(Questmap, SEAS). Moreover, current artificial intelligence research offers
precise accounts of evidential reasoning and thus provides a clear semantics of
graphical notations as well as ways to compute with them. In the legal domain, fact investigators and litigators increasingly use
software that supports the storage and retrieval of information in terms of
conceptual and relational networks (Holmes 2, Analyst’s Notebook). However, as
yet, such tools offer little or no support for the structuring of human
thinking about thus stored information. This software allows users to store
evidentiary data in terms of events, objects, actors, and the relations among
these things, but it does not allow users to represent how such data support or
undermine hypotheses about what has happened.
This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars and
practitioners from such fields as law, philosophy, computer science, artificial
intelligence, cognitive psychology, and linguistics who are interested in the
graphic visualization of legal evidentiary inference and its support by
software tools. The following issues
will be addressed:
Conference officials: Peter Tillers (Cardozo Law School): Conference chair e-mail address: peter@tillers.net Henry Prakken (Universiteit Utrecht / University of Groningen): Program
chair e-mail address: henry@cs.uu.nl Thomas D. Cobb (University of Washington, Seattle): Deputy program
chair e-mail address: tomcobb@u.washington.edu Panelists: · Thomas D. Cobb
(University of Washington School of Law) · Philip Dawid (U. College
London) · Neal
Feigenson (Quinnipiac University School of Law) · Branden
Fitelson (U. of California at Berkeley) · Tim van Gelder (U. of
Melbourne) · Thomas
F. Gordon (FOKUS [Frauenhofer Institut fuer Offene Kommunikationssysteme]);
web log · Bruce Hay (Harvard Law School)
· John Josephson (Ohio State
University) · Marc
Lauritsen (CEO, Capstone Practice Systems) · Richard
Lempert (U. of Michigan Law School & National Science Foundation) · Ronald
P. Loui (Washington University, St. Louis; Computer Science) · John Lowrance
(Program Director, Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International) · Jennifer Mnookin
(UCLA School of Law) · Dale
Nance (Case School of Law) · Priit
Parmakson (Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia) · John L. Pollock (U. of Arizona) · Henry Prakken
(Utrecht University & U. Groningen) · Chris Reed (U. of
Dundee) · Burkhard Schafer
(U. of Edinburgh, Law School) · David Schum
(George Mason U.) · Richard
Sherwin (New York Law School) · Samuel
Solomon (CEO of DOAR, Inc.) · Peter Tillers
(Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University) · William
Twining (U. College London, Law Faculty & U. of Miami, School of Law) · Bart
Verheij (U. Groningen, Dept. of Artificial Intelligence; ALICE Institute) · Vern Walker
(Hofstra U. School of Law) · Douglas
Walton (U. of Winnipeg) |