A Pragmatic Legal Expert System

This work aims to show that a legal expert system need not be based upon a complex model of legal reasoning in order to produce useful advice. It advocates a pragmatic approach to the design of legal expert systems - an approach based on the way in which lawyers deal with the law day-to- day. It argues that a system based upon a simple model of legal reasoning can still produce good advice, where that advice is evaluated by reference to the accuracy of the system's predictions and to the quality of its arguments. Furthermore, such a system, with its knowledge of representation structure, makes simpler the process of knowledge acquisition.