Henry Prakken

I am a senior lecturer in the Intelligent Systems Group of the computer science department at Utrecht University, and professor in Legal Informatics and Legal Argumentation at the Law Faculty of the University of Groningen. I have master degrees in law (1985) and philosophy (1988) from the University of Groningen. Since May 2021 I also have a temporary appointment as a parttime professor at the European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

In 1993 I obtained my PhD degree (cum laude) at the Free University Amsterdam with a thesis titled Logical Tools for Modelling Legal Argument. My main research interests concern artificial intelligence & law and computational models of argumentation. I am a past president of the International Association for AI & Law (IAAIL), of the JURIX Foundation for Legal Knowledge-Based Systems and of the steering committee of the COMMA conferences on Computational Models of Argument. I am on the editorial board of several journals. In 2017-2022 I was an associate editor of Artificial Intelligence.

LATEST:

I have received the 2023 CodeX Prize of CodeX - The Stanford Center of Legal Informatics, Stanford University, jointly with Trevor Bench-Capon and Giovanni Sartor, in acknowledgement of our work on argumentation theory and its application to the law.
Call for papers of Deon 2023. Submission deadline 31 March 2023.
I was a co-organiser of a symposium on Law and Artificial Intelligence: Not a World Apart, Utrecht (The Netherlands), 18 May 2022.
My reader Juridische Argumentatie (in Dutch) is now downloadable under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0.
Mijn commentaar als referent op het preadvies van Eric Tjiong Tjin Tai tijdens het jaarcongres 2020 van de Nederlandse Juristenvereniging. De preadviezen zijn hier te downloaden.
John Fox, the leader of the ASPIC project (2004-2007) died on August 31, 2021. Links to a tribute and an obituary.
I was interviewed by the Dutch newspaper NRC about IBM's Debater project.
The special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science on Models of Rational Proof in Criminal Law, edited by myself, Floris Bex and Anne Ruth Mackor, is now online. See also the introduction. With useful case study material for argumentation research, including my argumentation-based analysis of the Simonshaven case.
I am the coordinator of a special-interest group on AI, Ethics and Law of the new UU focus area Human-centered AI.
I take part in the 19 million euro NWO Gravity project on Hybrid Intelligence.
My invited talk Abstract argumentation does not exist at the ILLC Workshop on The wisdom and madness of crowds: argumentation, information exchange and social interaction.
A new online complaints system of the Dutch Police has ASPIC+ inside. See also Schraagen et al. (2018).
I was interviewed about the 'robot judge' in the Dutch newspaper Trouw.
A report of a tutorial for judges (in Dutch).
Some recent and forthcoming papers:
- My COMMA 2022 paper on dialectical argument strength.
- Mijn bijdrage Rechters en raadsheren over Bayes in het liber amoricum voor Peter van Koppen.
- My ECSQARU 2021 paper on argument strength and gradual acceptability.
- My ICAIL 2021 paper with Floris Bex on the relevance of algorithmic decision predictors for judicial decision making.
- My paper with Rosa Ratsma on argumentation for explainable AI, accepted for Argument & Computation.
- A paper A formal analysis of some factor- and precedent-based accounts of precedential constraint in Artificial Intelligence and Law.
- My CMNA 2020 paper On validating theories of abstract argumentation frameworks: the case of bipolar argumentation frameworks.
- I co-authored an in memoriam of Doug Walton for Artificial Intelligence and Law.
- A handbook chapter on Logical models of legal argumentation. In M. Knauff & W. Spohn (eds.): The Handbook of Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2021.
- A TPLP paper with Alejandro Garcia and Guillermo Simari on a comparison between ASPIC+ and DeLP.
- My ICAIL 2019 paper on accrual of arguments.
- My COMMA 2018 paper with Michiel de Winter on the dangers of abstraction in argumentation.
- My KR 2018 paper on probabilistic strength of arguments with structure.
- An AI Magazine paper Towards artificial argumentation (with many co-authors). [Link to journal issue]
- An AI & Law Journal paper on making autonomous vehicles conform to traffic law.
- My chapters in the Handbook of Formal Argumentation on the history of formal argumentation (version August 15th, 2017) and (with Sanjay Modgil) on abstract rule-based argumentation (version July 4th, 2017).
- An introductory book chapter on Logics of argumentation and the law, in H.P. Glenn & L.D. Smith (eds): Law and the New Logics. Cambridge University Press 2017, pp. 3-31.
- A corrected version of my 2013 AIJ paper with Sanjay Modgil on the ASPIC+ framework. A note on the corrections.
- A JAIR paper of Diana Grooters and myself Two aspects of relevance in structured argumentation: minimality and paraconsistency (solving the contamination problem in ASPIC+ and other things; an extended version of our COMMA 2014 paper).
- My AI Journal review with Giovanni Sartor on Law and logic: a review from an argumentation perspective. Published AI Journal version. Corrected version A note on corrections.
- My ECAI 2014 paper on abstract support relations