CodeX – The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics announced the recipients of its second annual CodeX Prize at this year’s CodeX FutureLaw 2022 Conference. CodeX FutureLaw brings together researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, investors, and policymakers worldwide to focus on how technology is changing the legal profession and the law itself and how these changes affect us all.
The CodeX Prize is an annual award given to individuals for a noteworthy contribution to computational law — an idea, article, book, computer application, computer tool, organization, etc., that has had a significant and enduring positive impact on the field. This year’s CodeX Prize was awarded to University of Pittsburgh School of Law Professor Kevin Ashley and Edwina Rissland, University of Massachusetts Amherst. The award acknowledges their work on case-based reasoning in automated legal analysis and the development of the HYPO system while Ashley was at the University of Massachusetts for precedent-based legal rationale.
“Since the late 1980s, many computational models of legal argument have adapted HYPO-style dimensions and factors, stereotypical fact patterns that strengthen or weaken a legal claim,” said Ashley. “An ability to identify factors automatically in case texts would support legal information retrieval of arguments and assist text-based deep learning to explain predictions.”
On receiving the CodeX Prize, Ashley said, “Ideally, the Codex Prize will encourage researchers in AI and Law to continue efforts to apply text analytic methods to identify factors in case texts.”
The CodeX award was announced publicly in a short ceremony during this year’s CodeX FutureLaw conference.