ICAIL at 25

call for expression of interest

2012 sees the 25^th anniversary of the International Conference on AI and Law. This conference series has played an important role in the development of AI and Law, by bringing researchers together and developing a community, and by being the forum in which many important ideas were introduced.

To mark this anniversary, the editors of AI and Law journal would like to produce a special issue of that journal. The proposed format will be a little unusual, since it is intended to reflect the breadth of the conference and the range of the papers that have appeared there. Our idea is that a large number of contributors should each write a short piece about some particular paper that appeared in ICAIL. The paper should be one that has contributed to the contributor’s understanding of some aspect of AI and Law, and which still has some message for today.

The final contributions should be at most two pages and should cover

· The research context of the paper: the state of the art at the time;

· The contribution of the paper (e.g. the technique, method, or question it introduced; its main theoretical or empirical results; or other contribution);

· How this contribution influenced the author personally;

· How this contribution has been developed in AI and Law;

· Why the paper is important today (e.g. lines of research that remain open, or questions that need no longer be asked).

The issue will be most successful if there is a good spread of papers, both in subject matter and in the conferences from which they came, so it important to coordinate the papers that will be written about. The purpose of this initial call for papers is to identify those who are interested in contributing, and to take initial bids for the papers they will write about.

Please could you let Trevor Bench-Capon (tbc@csc.liv.ac.uk) know, by 17^th February, whether you are interested in contributing, and, if so, three papers that you would be interested in writing about. All that is needed now is the expression of interest and the titles of three papers. We hope that as many people as possible will contribute: part of the idea of the format is to impose as light as possible burden of the contributors, to encourage response.

The suggested timetable is:

17^th February: Expression of Interest and Initial bids

24^th February: Allocation of Papers to Contributors

23^rd March: Submissions

6^th April: Comments to Authors (review will be light touch, but some helpful suggestions may be made at this point)

27^th April: Final versions