Artificial intelligence and Law (AI and Law) is a subfield of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 (AI) mainly concerned with applications of AI to legal informatics problems and original research on those problems. It is also a field concerned to contribute in the other direction: to export original tools and techniques to the larger enterprise of AI, by concerning itself with automation in the legal domain (e.g. contributing to natural language processing, intelligent databases, and datamining), theories of legal decision making (e.g., contributing to knowledge representation and automated reasoning), and models of social organization based on the rule of law (e.g., contributing to multi-agent systems).

AI and Law has been in existence since L. Thorne McCarty's Harvard Law Review article in 1976, "Reflections on Taxman: An Experiment in Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning."

The main community of AI and Law convenes a semi-annual conference, The International Conference on AI and Law. There are related conferences, including JURIX

JURIX

JURIX is a foundation based in the Netherlands that deals with legal subjects in relation to information technology and especially interconnects computer and legal scientists from that country. It is known for organizing the so called open and international JURIX conferences that are held annually...

 (the Dutch Legal Informatics group), and researchers whose principal concerns are expert systems in law, multiagent systems, ontologies, defeasible reasoning

Defeasible reasoning

Defeasible reasoning is a kind of reasoning that is based on reasons that are defeasible, as opposed to the indefeasible reasons of deductive logic...

, deontic logic

Deontic logic

Deontic logic is the field of logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Alternatively, a deontic logic is a formal system that attempts to capture the essential logical features of these concepts...

, case-based reasoning

Case-based reasoning

Case-based reasoning , broadly construed, is the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems. An auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recalling another car that exhibited similar symptoms is using case-based reasoning...

, and social philosophy

Social philosophy

Social philosophy is the philosophical study of questions about social behavior . Social philosophy addresses a wide range of subjects, from individual meanings to legitimacy of laws, from the social contract to criteria for revolution, from the functions of everyday actions to the effects of...

.

Because of the influence of Howard Turtle's WIN system (WestLaw

Westlaw

Westlaw is one of the primary online legal research services for lawyers and legal professionals in the United States and is a part of West. In addition, it provides proprietary database services...

's natural language

Natural language

In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...

 query search interface to its citation

Citation

Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source . More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated...

 database), and other legal research databases, AI and Law research was concerned with search, citation

Citation

Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source . More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated...

 ranking, ontologies, semantic technologies (e.g., semantic web

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

), and xml

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 before many other communities.

Legal decisionmaking takes place in a constructed social world (as opposed to the naturalistic

Naturalism (philosophy)

Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...

 world that is subject to empirical investigation), so AI and Law has been less concerned with machine learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

over continuous spaces than other areas of AI in recent decades.