Decision-Aiding Software and Legal Decision-Making

Decision-Aiding Software and Legal Decision-Making PDF Author: Stuart S. Nagel
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The use of microcomputers as decision aids in law practice is increasing rapidly. Nagel here shows how developments in software over the last few years are making microcomputers practically indispensable to lawyers as decision aids. This is in contrast to his earlier book on Microcomputers as Decision Aids in Law Practice. It dealt speculatively with ways in which decision-aiding software could be used by lawyers for judicial prediction, litigation strategy, allocating scarce resources, and negotiation-mediation. The book is divided into three parts covering general developments, specific lawyer skills, and application to all fields of law. The first part previews various uses of decision-aiding software by practicing lawyers, including a general discussion of the potential and actual benefits of such software. How decision-aiding software enhances specific lawyer skills comprises the second and largest part of the work. Among the topics discussed are computer-aided counseling, computer-aided mediation, legal policy evaluation and computer-aided advocacy, law prediction, and legal administration. In the third part, Nagel assesses applications of decision-aiding software to all fields of law, with an emphasis on contracts, property, torts, family law, criminal law, constitutional law, economic regulation, international law, civil procedure, and criminal procedure. In a provocative concluding chapter, he deals with the thorny issues of individual ethics and professional responsibility in the context of microcomputers. Because decision-aiding software encourages decision makers to be much more explicit about their goals than they otherwise would be, its use raises questions as to whose goals should be pursued and to what degree. This is a nuts-and-bolts guidebook that will be a valuable tool for practicing attorneys with some knowledge of microcomputers and is recommended reading for legal scholars and law students.

Decision-Aiding Software and Legal Decision-Making

Decision-Aiding Software and Legal Decision-Making PDF Author: Stuart S. Nagel
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
The use of microcomputers as decision aids in law practice is increasing rapidly. Nagel here shows how developments in software over the last few years are making microcomputers practically indispensable to lawyers as decision aids. This is in contrast to his earlier book on Microcomputers as Decision Aids in Law Practice. It dealt speculatively with ways in which decision-aiding software could be used by lawyers for judicial prediction, litigation strategy, allocating scarce resources, and negotiation-mediation. The book is divided into three parts covering general developments, specific lawyer skills, and application to all fields of law. The first part previews various uses of decision-aiding software by practicing lawyers, including a general discussion of the potential and actual benefits of such software. How decision-aiding software enhances specific lawyer skills comprises the second and largest part of the work. Among the topics discussed are computer-aided counseling, computer-aided mediation, legal policy evaluation and computer-aided advocacy, law prediction, and legal administration. In the third part, Nagel assesses applications of decision-aiding software to all fields of law, with an emphasis on contracts, property, torts, family law, criminal law, constitutional law, economic regulation, international law, civil procedure, and criminal procedure. In a provocative concluding chapter, he deals with the thorny issues of individual ethics and professional responsibility in the context of microcomputers. Because decision-aiding software encourages decision makers to be much more explicit about their goals than they otherwise would be, its use raises questions as to whose goals should be pursued and to what degree. This is a nuts-and-bolts guidebook that will be a valuable tool for practicing attorneys with some knowledge of microcomputers and is recommended reading for legal scholars and law students.

Decision-Aiding Software

Decision-Aiding Software PDF Author: Stuart S. Nagel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349116572
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The aim of this book is to clarify what is involved in using decision-aiding software in evaluative decision-making at a non-technical level. Topics covered include the skills that software enhances, the obstacles that it helps overcome, and the applications to diverse fields.

Applications in Decision-aiding Software

Applications in Decision-aiding Software PDF Author: Stuart S. Nagel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349124982
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Decision-aiding software is applied in this book to government, personal decisions, law, teaching, decision-analysis research, cross-national decision-making, business and politics.

Law, Decision-Making, and Microcomputers

Law, Decision-Making, and Microcomputers PDF Author: Stuart S. Nagel
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The rise of microcomputers and the power that they've brought have revolutionized nearly every professional discipline, not the least of which is the field of law. This work presents a survey of microcomputers and decision-aiding software in law practices and the legal process, offering a variety of perspectives from contributors around the world. The book defines decision-making software as having the ability to aid in the processing of a set of law-related alternatives, relative criteria, or rules for determining which alternative should or will be chosen and the relationship between each alternative and criterion. These basic ideas are applied to the work of various members of the legal community, including practicing lawyers, legal policy-makers, and legal scholars. Following a detailed introduction that provides an overview of the nature, trends, and costs/benefits of decision-making software, the book focuses on the different members of the legal community and the normative and predictive questions that microcomputers and software can help to answer. Part One deals with the practicing lawyer, who must decide whether to go to trial or settle out of court, and predicts the outcome of going to trial or the effects of alternative contract clauses. The legal policymaker, who must decide among alternative statutes and predict the effect of legal policy, is addressed in Part Two. Topics of discussion here include the role of computers in federal tax compliance and using computers to assist in sentencing. Part Three examines the legal scholar and law training, covering subjects such as the American legal computer education and using microcomputers in case-method teaching. Finally, Part Four provides analyses that cut across all three parts of the legal profession, with special concentration on legal prescription and prediction that apply to a wide variety of legal fields, countries, and purposes of the law. This volume will be of particular interest to practicing lawyers in government and private practice, law professors and students, and legal researchers and librarians. Public, academic, and law libraries will also find it to be a valuable addition to their collections.

SHYSTER: A Pragmatic Legal Expert System

SHYSTER: A Pragmatic Legal Expert System PDF Author: James Popple
Publisher: Australian National Univ.
ISBN: 0731518276
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Most legal expert systems attempt to implement complex models of legal reasoning. But the utility of a legal expert system lies not in the extent to which it simulates a lawyer’s approach to a legal problem, but in the quality of its predictions and of its arguments. A complex model of legal reasoning is not necessary: a successful legal expert system can be based upon a simplified model of legal reasoning. Some researchers have based their systems upon a jurisprudential approach to the law, yet lawyers are patently able to operate without any jurisprudential insight. A useful legal expert system should be capable of producing advice similar to that which one might get from a lawyer, so it should operate at the same pragmatic level of abstraction as does a lawyer—not at the more philosophical level of jurisprudence. A legal expert system called SHYSTER has been developed to demonstrate that a useful legal expert system can be based upon a pragmatic approach to the law. SHYSTER has a simple representation structure which simplifies the problem of knowledge acquisition. Yet this structure is complex enough for SHYSTER to produce useful advice. SHYSTER is a case-based legal expert system (although it has been designed so that it can be linked with a rule-based system to form a hybrid legal expert system). Its advice is based upon an examination of, and an argument about, the similarities and differences between cases. SHYSTER attempts to model the way in which lawyers argue with cases, but it does not attempt to model the way in which lawyers decide which cases to use in those arguments. Instead, it employs statistical techniques to quantify the similarity between cases. It decides which cases to use in argument, and what prediction it will make, on the basis of that similarity measure. SHYSTER is of a general design: it can provide advice in areas of case law that have been specified by a legal expert using a specification language. Hence, it can operate in different legal domains. Four different, and disparate, areas of law have been specified for SHYSTER, and its operation has been tested in each of those domains. Testing of SHYSTER in these four domains indicates that it is exceptionally good at predicting results, and fairly good at choosing cases with which to construct its arguments. SHYSTER demonstrates the viability of a pragmatic approach to legal expert system design.

A Pragmatic Legal Expert System

A Pragmatic Legal Expert System PDF Author: James Popple
Publisher: Dartmouth (Ashgate)
ISBN: 1855217392
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Most legal expert systems attempt to implement complex models of legal reasoning. This book argues that a complex model is unnecessary. It advocates a simpler, pragmatic approach in which the utility of a legal expert system is evaluated by reference, not to the extent to which it simulates a lawyer's approach to a legal problem, but to the quality of its predictions and of its arguments. The author describes the development of a legal expert system, called SHYSTER, which takes a pragmatic approach to case law. He discusses the testing of SHYSTER in four different and disparate areas of case law, and draws conclusions about the advantages and limitations of this approach to legal expert system development. Chapter 1 presents a critical analysis of previous work of relevance to the development of legal expert systems. Chapter 2 explains the pragmatic approach that was adopted in the development of SHYSTER. The implementation of SHYSTER is detailed using examples in chapter 3. Chapter 4 describes the testing of SHYSTER, and conclusions are drawn from those tests in chapter 5. Examples of SHYSTER's output are provided in appendices.

International Policy Studies Curriculum

International Policy Studies Curriculum PDF Author: Stuart S. Nagel
Publisher: Nova Publishers
ISBN: 9781594546945
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The basic elements of this book involve integrating five policy problems, four developing regions, and four fields of knowledge. The five policy problems are economic, technology, social, political, and legal. The four developing regions are Africa, Asia, East Europe, and Latin America. The four fields of knowledge are natural science, social science, humanities, and law. A part of this book was published as International Policy Studies: A Win-Win Curriculum.

Public Policy Evaluation

Public Policy Evaluation PDF Author: Stuart S. Nagel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429831080
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
First published in 1998, this volume examines how super-optimum decisions involve finding alternatives to controversies whereby Conservatives, Liberals, or other major groups can all come out ahead of their best initial expectations simultaneously. This book is organised in terms of concepts, methods, causes, process, substance, and the policy studies profession. Concepts clarify that policy evaluation traditionally involves: (1) Goals to be achieved; (2) Alternatives available for achieving them; (3) Relations between goals and alternatives; (4) Drawing a conclusion as to the best alternative in light of the goals, alternatives, and relations; and (5) Analysing how the conclusion would change if there were changes in the goals, alternatives, or relations. Super-optimizing also involves five related steps, but with the following improvements: (1) Goals are designed as conservative, liberal, or neutral; (2) Alternatives get the same designations; (3) Relations are simplified to indicate which alternatives are relatively high or low on each goal; (4) The conclusion involves arriving at an alternative that does better on Goal A than Alternative A, and simultaneously better on Goal B than Alternative B; and (5) The fifth step involves analysing the super-optimum or win-win alternative in terms of its feasibility as to the economic, technological, psychological, political, administrative, and legal matters.

Research in Law and Policy Studies

Research in Law and Policy Studies PDF Author: Stuart S. Nagel
Publisher: JAI Press
ISBN: 9781559381123
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description


Handbook of Public Policy Evaluation

Handbook of Public Policy Evaluation PDF Author: Stuart S. Nagel
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761923749
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
This handbook deals with many aspects of public policy evaluation: including methods; examples; professionalism studies; perspectives; concepts; substance; theory applications; dispute resolution; interdisciplinary interaction.