Bart Verheij - Trial With and Without Numbers: How the law is changing information technology

Information technology is significantly changing the legal profession. Still, legal information technology is not yet creating radically new levels of value, such as a significant decrease in costs of legal services, or a radical increase of access to justice. Why not?

In this talk, it will be argued that before information technology can genuinely disrupt the law a long-standing technological hurdle needs to be overcome: how can logical and probabilistic tools become mutually supportive, instead of competitors?

The question is addressed in the context of forensic science, where the rise of DNA evidence has shown how hard it is to safely combine probabilistic and logical reasoning. An integrated formal perspective on evidential reasoning is presented that shows how logical reasoning with arguments and scenarios can be embedded in standard probability theory. The perspective provides foundations for the integration of logical and probabilistic computational tools.

The research reported on has been performed in the context of the NWO Forensic Science project "Designing and Understanding Forensic Bayesian Networks with Arguments and Scenarios" (http://www.ai.rug.nl/~verheij/nwofs/) and a residential fellowship at the CodeX center for legal informatics (Stanford University).