When Precedents Clash
Cecilia Di Florio, Huimin Dong, Antonino Rotolo

TL;DR
This paper enhances legal case-based reasoning models by integrating hierarchical court structures and temporal relations to better handle conflicting precedents and formalize concepts like overruling and per incuriam cases.
Contribution
It introduces an enriched classifier model incorporating court hierarchy and temporal aspects, enabling clearer decision-making amidst conflicting precedents in common law systems.
Findings
Formalization of overruled and per incuriam cases within the model
Conditions for unambiguous decision-making in conflicting precedents
Integration of hierarchical and temporal information improves legal reasoning
Abstract
Consistency of case bases is a way to avoid the problem of retrieving conflicting constraining precedents for new cases to be decided. However, in legal practice the consistency requirements for case bases may not be satisfied. As pointed out in (Broughton 2019), a model of precedential constraint should take into account the hierarchical structure of the specific legal system under consideration and the temporal dimension of cases. This article continues the research initiated in (Liu et al. 2022; Di Florio et al. 2023), which established a connection between Boolean classifiers and legal case-based reasoning. On this basis, we enrich the classifier models with an organisational structure that takes into account both the hierarchy of courts and which courts issue decisions that are binding/constraining on subsequent cases. We focus on common law systems. We also introduce a temporal…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMulti-Agent Systems and Negotiation · Legal Language and Interpretation · Comparative and International Law Studies
MethodsFocus
