Legal expertise and legal experts in Athenian democracy

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-168
Author(s):  
Edward M. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Classical Period ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
Legal Expert ◽  
Legal Expertise

This essay refutes the view that the Athenians of the Classical period were hostile to legal expertise. The Athenians had much respect for the Areopagus and the Exegetai, who were experts in law and religion. The legal expert Phanodemus was often praised and entrusted with important responsibilities. Litigants in public cases often show their legal knowledge by copious citation of statutes. They sometimes accuse their opponents of deceitful use of rhetoric never attack them for legal expertise. In the speech of Lysias Against Nicomachus, the accuser charges the defendant with illegally modifying the rules about sacrifices but never arouses suspicions about his legal expertise.

"Legal Expert" Project

1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hajime Yoshino ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Expert System ◽  
Expert Systems ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Knowledge Structure ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Legal Expert ◽  
Legal Expert Systems

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.

How often did the Athenian Assembly Meet?

1986 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward M. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Fixed Number ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Short Notice

According to the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Ath. Pol. 43.4), the Assembly in Athens met four times every prytany. At each one of these meetings certain topics had to be discussed or voted on. For instance, a vote concerning the conduct of magistrates presently in office was to be taken at the κυρ⋯α ⋯κκλησ⋯α. At another meeting anyone who wished to could request a discussion of any matter, be it private or public. Nothing is said in this passage or anywhere else in the Constitution of the Athenians about the possibility of holding additional meetings of the Assembly in times of emergency, but in a few passages in the Attic orators we find the term ⋯κκλησία σύγκλητος used. The scholia to these passages and some entries in the ancient lexica indicate that this term refers to an extra meeting of the Assembly which could be convened at short notice in order to deal with emergencies.On the basis of this information, scholars have in the past concluded that the Assembly normally met four times each prytany in the Classical period, but that extra meetings, called ⋯κκλησίαɩ σύγκλητοɩ, could also be held if the need arose. Recently, however, M. H. Hansen, whose work on many aspects of the Assembly has greatly increased our understanding of Athenian democracy, has challenged this communis opinio. Hansen argues that the evidence found in the scholia and lexica is unreliable and should be disregarded. In his view, several passages in the speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes and some fines in IG ii 212 indicate that the Assembly met a fixed number of times each prytany, no more, no less.

Special Issue on AI and Law

1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-82
Author(s):  
Hajime Yoshino ◽  
Katsumi Nitta
Keyword(s):  
Expert Systems ◽  
Logic Programming ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Case Based Reasoning ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Abductive Logic ◽  
Abductive Logic Programming ◽  
Legal Expert ◽  
Legal Expert Systems ◽  
Case Based

Lawyers use a reasoning process known as legal reasoning to solve legal problems. Legal expert systems could potentially help lawyers solve legal problems more quick and adequately, enable students to study law at school or at home more easily, and help legal scholars and professionals analyze the law and legal systems more clearly and precisely.In 1992, Hajime Yoshino of Meiji Gakuin University started a “Legal Expert Systems” project. This “Legal Expert” project is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and is scheduled to run from May 1992 to March 1998. Yoshino organized over 30 lawyers and computer scientists to clarify legal knowledge and develop legal expert systems.This project covers a wide range of technologies such as the analysis of legal knowledge, the analysis of legal rules on international trade (United Nations Convention on Contracts for International Sale of Goods (CISG)), legal knowledge representation, legal inference models, utility programs to develop legal knowledge bases, and user interfaces. This project, which ends in March 1998, will focus on developing comprehensive legal expert systems as the final product. In this issue, we present 12 papers written by “Legal Expert” project members.In this number, Hajime Yoshino gives are overview of the legal expert systems project, explaining its aims, objectives, and organization. Six papers that follow his introduction include three on case-based reasoning. Legal rules are given by ambiguous predicates, making it difficult sometimes to determine whether conditions for rules are satisfied by the facts given of an event. In such cases, lawyers often refer to old cases and generate hypotheses through analogical reasoning.Kaoru Hirota, Hajime Yoshino and Ming Qiang Xu apply fuzzy theory to case-based reasoning. A number of related systems have been developed, but most focus on qualitative similarities between old cases and the current case, and cannot measure quantitative similarities. Hirota et al. treat quantitative similarity by applying fuzzy theory, explaining their method using CISG examples.Ken Satoh developed a way to compute an interpretation of undefined propositions in a legal rule using adversarial case-based reasoning. He translated old cases giving possible interpretations for a proposition into clauses in abductive logic programming and introduced abducibles to reason dynamically about important factors in an old case to the interpretation suiting the user’s purpose.Yoshiaki Okubo and Makoto Haraguchi formalized a way of attacking legal argument. Assume that an opponent has constructed a legal argument by applying a statute with an analogical interpretation. From the viewpoint of legal stability, the same statue for similar cases should be applied with the same interpretation. We thereby create a hypothetical case similar to the case in question and examine whether the statue can be interpreted analogically. Such a hypothetically similar case is created with the help of a goal-dependent abstraction framework. If a precedent in which a statue has been applied to a case with a different interpretation – particularly complete interpretation – can be found, the opponent’s argument is attacked by pointing out the incoherence of its interpretation of the statue.Takashi Kanai and Susumu Kunifuji proposed a legal reasoning system using abductive logic programming that deals with ambiguities in described facts and exceptions not described in articles. They examined the problems to be solved to develop legal knowledge bases through abductive logic programming, e.g., how to select ambiguities to be treated in abductive reasoning, how to describe time relationships, and how to describe an exception in terms of the application of abductive logic programming to legal reasoning.Toshiko Wakaki, Ken Satoh, and Katsumi Nitta presented an approach of reasoning about dynamic preferences in the framework of circumscription based on logic programming. To treat dynamic preferences correctly is required in legal reasoning to handle metarules such as lex posterior. This has become a hotly discussed topic in legal reasoning and more general nonmonotic reasoning. Comparisons of their method, Brewka’s approach, and Prakken and Sartor’s approach are discussed.Hiroyuki Matsumoto proposed a general legal reasoning model and a way of describing legal knowledge systematically. He applied his method to Japanese Maritime Traffic Law.Six more papers are to be presented in the next number

scholarly journals Comunicación simétrica y asimétrica en los blogs de divulgación jurídica: entre modalidad epistémica y modalidad deóntica

2018 ◽  
pp. 175-191
Author(s):  
Gianluca Pontrandolfo ◽  
Sara Piccioni
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Modality ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Situational Contexts ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Legal Expert ◽  
Symmetrical Communication ◽  
Selection Of

 This paper aims at investigating some discursive features of blawgs, namely legal blogs in which legal experts disseminate and popularise their expertise. More specifically, it involves a corpus-assisted discourse study of the ways in which situational contexts affect the practices and strategies used to represent, construct and communicate legal knowledge. A comparison is drawn between two corpora representative of two different types of communication: a selection of posts written by legal experts for other experts (symmetrical communication) and posts written by legal experts for laypersons (asymmetrical communication). Combining qualitative and quantitative observations, the analysis shows that, in symmetrical communication, the emphasis is on the blogger’s subjective interpretation of legal texts and on his role as knowledge disseminator, as indicated by the predominance of epistemic modality. In asymmetrical communication, on the other hand, the prevalence of deontic modality shifts the focus on to the reader as addressee of the advice, instructions and information provided by the legal expert.

Being a Disadvantaged Criminal Defendant: Mistrust and Resistance in Attorney-Client Interactions

Social Forces ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Clair
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Court ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Court System ◽  
Defense Attorneys ◽  
Self Advocacy ◽  
Knowledge And Skills ◽  
Criminal Defendant ◽  
Relational Theories ◽  
Legal Expertise

Abstract Researchers have documented the power of legal officials to administer sanctions, from arrest to court surveillance and incarceration. How do those subject to punishment interact with officials and attempt to subvert their power? Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations among 63 criminal defendants and 42 legal officials in the Boston-area court system, this article considers how socioeconomically and racially disadvantaged defendants interact with their defense attorneys, and with what consequences. Given racialized and classed constraints, many disadvantaged defendants mistrust their court-appointed lawyers. Their mistrust often results in withdrawal from their lawyers and active efforts to cultivate their own legal knowledge and skills. Defendants use their lay legal expertise to work around and resist the authority of their lawyers. Defense attorneys and judges respond with silencing and coercion, given the unwritten norms and rules of the court. These findings complicate existing accounts of disadvantaged defendants as passive actors and contribute to cultural sociological and relational theories of how people engage with professionals across institutional spaces. Unlike in mainstream institutions such as schools and hospitals where self-advocacy is rewarded in interactions, criminal court officials reject disadvantaged defendants’ attempts to advocate for themselves.

scholarly journals Greek Tragedy on the Move

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Full Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective

This work is one of the first full studies of the dissemination of Greek tragedy in the archaic and classical periods. Drawing on recent research in network theory, it seeks to reinterpret classical tragedy as a Panhellenic art form. It thereby offers a radically new perspective on the interpretation of the extant tragic texts, which have often been seen as the product of the fifth-century Athenian democracy. Tragedy grew out of, and became part of, a common Greek (or Panhellenic) culture, which was itself sustained by frequent travel and exchange. This book shows how Athens was a major Panhellenic centre within a wider and, by the fifth century, well-established network of festivals and patrons. The part played by non-Athenians in the festival culture of Attica is fully reassessed and it is estimated that as much as a quarter of all tragic poets who produced plays in Athens during the classical period were non-citizens. In addition, the book re-examines the evidence for tragedies that were probably or certainly performed outside Athens and shows how and why they were calculated to appeal to a broad Panhellenic audience. The stories they contained were themselves tales of travel. Together the works of the tragedians told and reworked the history of the Greek peoples and showed how they were connected through the wanderings of their ancestors. Tragedy, like the poets and their creations, was meant to travel and this is the first full study of tragedy on the move in the archaic and classical periods.

AI and Law (2)

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Hajime Yoshinoand Katsumi Nitta ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Base ◽  
User Interfaces ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Nonmonotonic Reasoning ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Legal Expert ◽  
Knowledge Representation Language ◽  
Legal Knowledge Representation ◽  
New Framework

In the last issue (Vol.1, No.2), we introduced the Legal Expert System (LES) project led by Hajime Yoshino of Meiji Gakuin University, presenting six papers on the LES project. Those papers were mainly related to higher order reasoning systems such as ase-based reasoning, abductive and inductive logic programming, nonmonotonic reasoning, and analogical reasoning. The objective of the LES project was to develop a legal expert system effective for use by lawyers, so the project covers inference mechanisms, analysis of legal knowledge, and user interfaces. In this second special issue on the LES project, we present five more papers, mainly related to the analysis of legal knowledge, legal knowledge representation language, and legal reasoning system user interfaces. Hajime Yoshino analyzes the logical structure of contract law. To develop a knowledge base for the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), he proposes a clear logical model of the contract law system, which treats relations between events and legal status such as rights and obligations. Yoshino demonstrates that legal metarules are effective in constructing deductive legal reasoning systems, and are appropriate from the viewpoint of jurisprudence. Seiichiro Sakurai discusses the logical features of the legal knowledge representation language, CPF, developed by Hajime Yoshino. CPF is a logic programming language that enhances the representation of complex data structures. CPF is a convenient tool for representing legal knowledge, yet lawyers often attempt to describe nonexecutable forms of CPF rules.Sakurai introduces a way to construct an executable knowledge base from lawyers' CPF rules. Masato Shibasaki and Katsumi Nitta introduce a new framework to formalize nonmonotonic reasoning with dynamic priorities. The several frameworks proposed thus far to model relationships among arguments do not treat complex arguments, composed of strict rules and default rules. They show that the new framework represents such relationships and analyze these relationships for this framework and others. Takashi Miyata and Yuji Matsumoto introduce LES natural language generation using a user interface for lawyers rather than computer scientists. They describe a sentence generation system that translates logical forms provided from an inference engine into natural-language sentences, and present the unification grammar, generation algorithm and graphical debugging tool. To develop a knowledge base, the lawyers of the LES project analyze and represents the relationships between requirements (actions or events) and consequences (legal status) of legal rules in the form of logical flowcharts. Once the appropriateness of a flowchart is confirmed, they convert it to a CPF rule in their knowledge base. Koji Miyagi, Motoki Miura and Jiro Tanaka developed a flowchart editor that makes legal flowcharting easier. To make it easier to decide where to locate flowchart components and draw linens between the components, the editor possesses several algorithms.

scholarly journals Freedom and Patronage in the Athenian Democracy

2016 ◽  
Vol 136 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew T. Alwine
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
Financial Independence ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Democratic Regimes

Abstract:To ask a question about ‘patronage’ is to view the issue from a top-down, broadly-conceived theoretical perspective. To understand Athenian political thought, we need to take an emic approach, to consider the perspective of the Athenian citizenry, which was concerned with present realities rather than complex, abstract models. The Athenian system's protection of individual citizens incidentally put broad restrictions on elite patronage, but, despite these limitations, relationships of patronage persisted throughout the Classical period albeit in non-threatening forms. Measures that ensured financial independence for the poor came only ad hoc and gradually. This article pursues three theses: (1) Athenians cared more about securing the freedoms of individual citizens than abolishing patronage, (2) patronage (as we would call it) existed in Athens but only in forms not threatening to civic freedoms and (3) in Athenian thinking political freedom was prior to financial independence. This article also explores the possibility of patronage systems existing in Greek poleis outside Athens, arguing that patronage-limiting practices were typical of democratic regimes but unusual for oligarchies.

Law as Technique

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralf Michaels ◽  
Annelise Riles
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Theoretical Innovation ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Legal Expertise

This chapter challenges anthropologists’ long-standing antipathy to the study of legal technique. It highlights Max Weber and Karl Llewellyn’s early interest in legal experts and legal knowledge as objects of sociological study, but suggests that the impetus to produce an external critique of law or context for law has hindered subsequent generations of anthropologists and sociolegal scholars from engaging legal technique as an object of ethnographic inquiry. In response, this chapter argues for greater ethnographic attention to the aspect of legal knowledge that most captivates lawyers: the means. The chapter highlights a growing body of sociolegal scholarship that engages with legal technique by drawing variously on systems theory and science and technology studies (STS) to illuminate the recursivity of legal expertise, the materiality of legal knowledge, and the agency of legal technique. Ultimately, this chapter argues that anthropologists’ long-standing attention to the constraints of form inherent in exchange can serve as a productive starting point both for anthropological theory and methods to elucidate the workings of legal knowledge, and for ethnography of legal technique to serve as a source of theoretical innovation.

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