Automating Judicial Document Drafting: A Discourse-Based Approach

Document drafting is a central judicial problem-solving activity. Development of automated systems to assist judicial document drafting has been impeded by the absence of an explicit model of (1) the connection between the document drafter’s goals and the text intended to achieve those goals, and (2) the rhetorical constraints expressing the stylistic and discourse conventions of the document’s genre. This paper proposes a model in which the drafter’s goals and the stylistic and discourse conventions are represented in a discourse structure consisting of a tree of illocutionary and rhetorical operators with document text as leaves. A document grammar based on the discourse structures of a representative set of documents can be used to synthesize a wide range of additional documents from sets of case facts. The applicability of this model to a representative class of judicial orders — jurisdictional show-cause orders — is demonstrated by illustrating (1) the analysis of show-cause orders in terms of discourse structures, (2) the derivation of a document grammar from discourse structures of two typical show-cause orders, and (3) the synthesis of a new show-cause order from the document grammar.