As a result of recent scandals concerning evidence and proof in the administration of criminal justice - ranging from innocent people on death row in the United States to misuse of statistics leading to wrongful convictions in The Netherlands and elsewhere - inquiries into the logic of evidence and proof have taken on a new urgency both in an academic and practical sense. This study presents a broad perspective on logic by focusing on inference not just in isolation but as embedded in contexts of procedure and investigation. With special attention being paid to recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and the Law, specifically related to evidentiary reasoning, this book provides clarification of problems of logic and argumentation in relation to evidence and proof. As the vast majority of legal conflicts relate to contested facts, rather than contested law, this volume concerning facts as prime determinants of legal decisions presents an important contribution to the field for both scholars and practitioners.

As a result of recent scandals concerning evidence and proof in the administration of criminal justice - ranging from innocent people on death row in the United States to misuse of statistics leading to wrongful convictions in The Netherlands and elsewhere - inquiries into the logic of evidence and proof have taken on a new urgency both in an academic and practical sense. This study presents a broad perspective on logic by focusing on inference not just in isolation but as embedded in contexts of procedure and investigation. With special attention being paid to recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and the Law, specifically related to evidentiary reasoning, this book provides clarification of problems of logic and argumentation in relation to evidence and proof. As the vast majority of legal conflicts relate to contested facts, rather than contested law, this volume concerning facts as prime determinants of legal decisions presents an important contribution to the field for both scholars and practitioners.

Trevor Bench-Capon is well recognised as an outstanding figure in Artificial Intelligence and Law, having published extensively over the long course of his career on legal knowledge representation, engineering methods for knowledge-based systems, theoretical and applied argumentation, case-based reasoning, policy-making, reasoning about evidence, and many other related topics. He has deeply influenced many of his colleagues, particularly with his earlier work on principled methods for legal knowledge representation and the engineering of knowledge-based systems, and later with the introduction of values in the study of argumentation. This Festschrift is in honour of Bench-Capon's work and its seminal influence. The articles contained here by his colleagues extensively review, comment on, and extend Bench-Capon's work. As a whole, the volume is a substantive introduction to the main topics and issues to which Bench-Capon has contributed so much.