Abstract of Invited Talk (1-hour) at ICAIL-2001 on May 23, 2001

(International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law;
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/icail2001 ; 
held Washington University Law School, St. Louis, MO, USA)


Title:  "Automating Law in the Small: 
         Contracts, Regulations, and Prioritized Argumentation"

Prof. Benjamin Grosof 
Information Technology group and Center for E-Business@MIT
MIT Sloan School of Management
http://www.mit.edu/~bgrosof
(Also, recently the leader of the Business Rules for E-Commerce group
at IBM Research.)

I discuss applications of rule-based declarative knowledge
representation to automating legal agreements and regulations of an
everyday character, i.e., "law in the small".  I begin by showing how
significant portions of contract descriptions can be modularly and
iteratively assembled, e.g., during B2B negotiations by XML-speaking
agents, and then have their provisions executed automatically directly
from those descriptions.  I discuss more generally how many
regulations and business policies can be treated in like manner, and
what advantages are to be gained by this approach.  In each of these
applications, exploiting the extension of usual rule-based techniques
to encompass computationally tractable prioritized default reasoning
and argumentation (cf. courteous logic programs) provides significant
benefits for human specification/comprehension, and for modularity in
automated modification/communication.