Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

The field of legal knowledge and information systems has traditionally been concerned with the subjects of legal knowledge representation and engineering, computational models of legal reasoning, and the analysis of legal data, but recent years have also seen an increasing interest in the application of machine learning methods to ease and empower the everyday activities of legal experts. This book presents the proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2020), organised this year as a virtual event on 9–11 December 2020 due to restrictions resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. For more than three decades, the annual JURIX international conference, which now also includes demo papers, has provided a platform for academics and practitioners to exchange knowledge about theoretical research and applications in concrete legal use cases. A total of 85 submissions by 255 authors from 28 countries were received for the conference, and after a rigorous review process, 20 were selected for publication as full papers, 14 as short papers, and 5 as demo papers. This selection process resulted in a total acceptance rate of 40% (full and short papers) and a competitive 23.5% acceptance rate for full papers. Topics span from computational models of legal argumentation, case-based reasoning, legal ontologies, smart contracts, privacy management and evidential reasoning to information extraction from different types of text in legal documents, and ethical dilemmas. Providing a state-of-the-art overview of developments in the field, this book will be of interest to all those working with legal knowledge and information systems.