Factors, issues and values: revisiting reasoning with cases

Abstract

In this paper we revisit reasoning with legal cases, with a view to articulating the relationships between issues, factors, facts and values, and to identifying areas for future work on these topics. We start from the different ways in which attempts have been made to go beyond a fortori reasoning from the precedent base, so that conclusions not fully justified by the precedents can be drawn. We then use a particular example domain taken from the literature to illustrate our preferred approach and to relate factors and values. From this we observe that much current work depends critically on the ascription of factors to cases in a Boolean manner, while in practice there are compelling reasons to see the presence of factors as a matter of degree. On the basis of our observations we make suggestions for the directions of future work on this topic.