The Legal Semantics Project

The domain of law is greatly underserved by current applications of artificial intelligence.

The need for such applications is great, however, because access to justice is severely limited in many legal areas.

The Legal Semantics Project has as its goal the development of special theories about the meaning of legal language.

Such theories must capture the background knowledge that lawyers and jurists bring to the language,

while also facilitating the development of useful AI applications.

The Legal Semantics Project has two dimensions.

First, legal semantic analysis develops theories and methodologies for extracting reasoning patterns from legal documents,

in order to use those patterns to formulate better arguments in future legal cases.

This requires developing semantic types for labeling legal information, as well as

creating annotations or labeled data that can be used to develop and test AI applications.

Second, the Project develops the AI analytics that are needed to power useful web applications for the legal domain.

The goal of the Project is to make those analytic tools publicly and freely available for use by others.

It is important that the Project provides documentation for both the legal semantic analysis and for the AI analytics.

Moreover, such documentation must be accessible to those trained in the law, as well as to those trained in AI technology.

The Legal Semantics Project aims to bridge the current divide between legal significance and technological advances.

Project Director: Vern R. Walker, Professor Emeritus, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, and

Founder and Former Director, Research Laboratory for Law, Logic & Technology (LLT Lab) at Hofstra University.

Prof. Walker's website contains background publications, presentations, and blogs related to the Legal Semantics Project.