Accommodating change

Abstract

The third of Berman and Hafner’s early nineties papers on reasoning with legal cases concerned temporal context, in particular the evolution of case law doctrine over time in response to new cases and against a changing background of social values and purposes. In this paper we consider the ways in which changes in case law doctrine can be accommodated in a recently proposed methodology for encapsulating case law theories (the ANGELIC methodology based on Abstract Dialectical Frameworks), and relate these changes the sources of change identified by Berman and Hafner.