AI Applications to the Law Domain in Japan

Artificial intelligence (AI) and law is an AI research area that has a history spanning more than 50 years. In the early stages, several legal-expert systems were developed. Legal-expert systems are tools designed to realize fair judgments in court. In addition to this research, as information and communication technologies and AI technologies have progressed, AI and law has broadened its view from legal-expert systems to legal analytics and, recently, a lot of machine-learning and text-processing techniques have been employed to analyze legal information. The research trends are the same in Japan as well and not only people involved with legal-expert systems, but also those involved with natural language processing as well as lawyers have become interested in AI and law. This report introduces the history of and the research activities on applying AI to the legal domain in Japan.

The Use of Legal Expert Systems in Administrative Decision Making

The chapter will now start with a short introduction into the Dutch General Assistance Act, its administration and the problems concerned with that administration. Then, I will discuss the idea of expert systems support and present the results of several investigations into the application of expert systems, in this context. Given these results, some have been quick to argue that expert systems are indeed important and valuable tools in the administration of welfare state programs. The next section will present important arguments against too much optimism. Both from a legal scientific as well as from a social scientific perspective, objections against the use of expert systems have been formulated. On the one hand, these objections have to be taken seriously, because they clearly have some validity, and thus require attention when discussing the possibilities of expert systems. On the other, it is important to notice that these objections have not prevented the introduction of these systems in general assistance in the Netherlands. As I will then explain, the fact that expert systems are now accepted by the General Assistance administrations, has to do with several specific factors, which really have promoted the use of expert systems in this field. Factors that have to do with the specific role of national regulation, with the professional status of the bureaucrats and with the increased scrutiny under which the administrations now have to function. In the last section of this chapter, I will draw some conclusions with respect to the general applicability of legal expert systems in service provision and provide some arguments for the idea that expert systems will soon become an important technology in electronic service delivery.

Legal Expert Systems in Administrative Organizations

The term expert system comes from the world of artificial intelligence. Originally, it comprised the idea that computer programs can be devised to solve complex problems of decision making, as well as, or even better than human experts. Although in some technical domains this ambitious goal is still valid, it is generally relaxed for applications in legal and administrative domains. Here the term expert system – or knowledge-based system – refers to a category of computer programs that use coded knowledge to help solve problems of decision making. One simple, everyday example is a computer program that helps a tax payer fill in his tax returns and informs him about the implications his answers will have in terms of the amount of tax to be paid. A second, quite different example is a system which, based on a textual summary of a case at hand, can help a legal professional in finding applicable case law.

"Legal Expert" Project

Since 1992, about 30 Japanese lawyers and computer scientists have been intensively engaged in a project of systematizing and computerizing legal reasoning. This project is the Study of Development of a Legal Expert System - Exploration of Legal Knowledge Structure and Implementation of Legal Reasoning or, in short, the "Legal Expert" Project. In this paper, I would like to introduce the Legal Expert project, explaining the goals, study organizations and their tasks in constructing legal expert systems in Japan.