A tool in modelling disagreement in law
Henry Prakken · 1991
This paper presents a formal theory aibout prefem"ng the most specific argument.l%e theo~y is applied to legal reasoning and used to formulate requirements for legal knowledge-based systems choosing between alternative arguments.It is based on a proposal of Poole, but improves it in two respects: firstly, default Iog"c is shown to be a better underlying Io@"c for defensible reasoning than standard first-order lo~-c; and secondly, specificity is defined iteratively, in order to handle muhiple conflicts and to characterize the set of prefk?red knowledge.lle theory is an example of the fact that Io@"c can be a tool in legal reasoning even if deduction is not regarded as the right way to model it,