Argumentation and explanation in the law

Antonino Rotolo; Giovanni Sartor

doi:10.3389/frai.2023.1130559

Argumentation and explanation in the law

Front Artif Intell. 2023 Sep 4:6:1130559. doi: 10.3389/frai.2023.1130559. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Antonino Rotolo¹, Giovanni Sartor^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Alma AI and Department of Legal Studies, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
² Department of Law, European University Institute, Florence, Italy.

Abstract

This article investigates the conceptual connection between argumentation and explanation in the law and provides a formal account of it. To do so, the methods used are conceptual analysis from legal theory and formal argumentation from AI. The contribution and results are twofold. On the one hand, we offer a critical reconstruction of the concept of legal argument, justification, and explanation of decision-making as it has been elaborated in legal theory and, above all, in AI and law. On the other hand, we propose some definitions of explanation in the context of formal legal argumentation, showing a connection between formal justification and explanation. We also investigate the notion of stable normative explanation developed elsewhere in Defeasible Logic and extend some complexity results. Our contribution is thus mainly conceptual, and it is meant to show how notions of explanation from literature on explainable AI and legal theory can be modeled in an argumentation framework with structured arguments.

Keywords: argumentation; defeasibility; explanation; justification; legal reasoning; normative systems.

Grants and funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No. 833647).