Study on the Structure of Argumentation in Case Law

This paper investigates natural-language argumentation in the case law domain. The starting point is a study on the discoursive and argumentative characteristiques of ten legal documents from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Then, a generalization of this study allows to formalize the structure of argumentation in the ECHR documents as a context-free grammar. The paper concludes with the evaluation of the grammar and a discussion of its main limitations.

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