A specialized expert system for judicial decision support

An expert system for assisting judges in deciding a specific set of cases was described. The system is complete: rather than just a demonstrative example of how expert system technology can be applied to law, it attempts to be a system that can be used in real-life situations. This required us to incorporate some features in addition to the standard inference-engine related features found in expert systems. In particular, we find the decision-composing part of JEDA interesting, and worthy of further development. JEDA itself does not "make" decisions, although it suggests them once they become evident based on the judge's input to the system, and takes the judges along the required steps, leaving the judicial decisions to the judge. We believe this is crucial if such systems were to be acceptable to the legal community. The inference engine itself is written in Prolog. As a result addition and modification of rules is fairly easy (and declarative). The system is equipped with modern graphics user interface, and was actually used by one of the authors who is a judge responsible for such cases.