Dispute resolution in legal mediation with quantitative argumentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel quantitative argumentation framework tailored for legal mediation, incorporating norms and facts to improve decision-making and efficiently update argument acceptability.

Contribution

It presents the QuAM framework that integrates legal norms and facts, and a formalism linking argument acceptability to variable values, specifically for legal dispute resolution.

Findings

Introduced QuAM framework for legal mediation

Developed a formalism linking argument acceptability to variable values

Illustrated approach with a real-world legal mediation example

Abstract

Mediation is often treated as an extension of negotiation, without taking into account the unique role that norms and facts play in legal mediation. Additionally, current approaches for updating argument acceptability in response to changing variables frequently require the introduction of new arguments or the removal of existing ones, which can be inefficient and cumbersome in decision-making processes within legal disputes. In this paper, our contribution is two-fold. First, we introduce a QuAM (Quantitative Argumentation Mediate) framework, which integrates the parties' knowledge and the mediator's knowledge, including facts and legal norms, when determining the acceptability of a mediation goal. Second, we develop a new formalism to model the relationship between the acceptability of a goal argument and the values assigned to a variable associated with the argument. We use a real-world legal mediation as a running example to illustrate our approach.