Context Graphs for Legal Reasoning and Argumentation

Abstract: We propose a new, structured, logic-based framework for legal reasoning and argumentation: Instead of using a single, unstructured meaning space, theory graphs organize knowledge and inference into collections of modular meaning spaces organized by inheritance and interpretation. Context graphs extend theory graphs by attack relations and interpret theories as knowledge contexts of agents in argumentation. We introduce the context graph paradigm by modeling the well-studied case Popov v. Hayashi, concentrating on the role of analogical reasoning in context graphs.