Logical Judges Challenge Human Judges on the Strange Case of B.C.-Valjean
This is an incremental step in applying AI to legal practice, targeting magistrates and legal professionals.
The paper tackled the demonstration of a Prolog-based logical judge for an armed robbery case to over 70 magistrates in Italy, resulting in a first-of-its-kind attempt to engage potential end-users with automated reasoning tools in the legal domain.
On May 12th, 2020, during the course entitled Artificial Intelligence and Jurisdiction Practice organized by the Italian School of Magistracy, more than 70 magistrates followed our demonstration of a Prolog logical judge reasoning on an armed robbery case. Although the implemented logical judge is just an exercise of knowledge representation and simple deductive reasoning, a practical demonstration of an automated reasoning tool to such a large audience of potential end-users represents a first and unique attempt in Italy and, to the best of our knowledge, in the international panorama. In this paper we present the case addressed by the logical judge - a real case already addressed by a human judge in 2015 - and the feedback on the demonstration collected from the attendees.