An empirical investigation of reasoning with legal cases through theory construction and application

In recent years several proposals to view reasoning with legal cases as theory construction have been advanced. The most detailed of these is that of Bench-Capon and Sartor, which uses facts, rules, values and preferences to build a theory designed to explain the decisions in a set of cases. In this paper we describe CATE (CAse Theory Editor), a tool intended to support the construction of theories as described by Bench-Capon and Sartor, and which produces executable code corresponding to a theory. CATE has been used in a series of experiments intended to explore a number of issues relating to such theories, including how the theories should be constructed, how sets of values should be compared, and the representation of cases using structured values as opposed to factors.