Towards the formalization of legal causal reasoning

Abstract

In order to build an artificial legal causal reasoner, i.e. a software component that can lead causal reasoning for legal purposes, it is necessary to enhance legal-theoretical accounts of causation by means of formal theories of commonsense reasoning, developed in philosophy, logic and artificial intelligence (AI). The article presents the methodological setup of the author's research about legal causal knowledge and it shows that merging legal-theoretical and AI-like views on causation requires a preliminary thorough ontological specification of the notion of 'Event', which is generally considered as the basic building block of causal reasoning.