Northwestern University, Chicago, IL & Zoom

Argument Mining and Empirical Legal Research (AMELR) Workshop

Overview

Our AMELR workshop focuses on Legal Argument Mining (LAM) - using NLP to automatically detect legal arguments. Recent developments in NLP and LAM have provided legal scholars with a powerful tool for studying reasoning patterns, interpretative theories, and biases across jurisdictions and legal systems. The workshop gathers experts in computer science, AI & Law, legal theory, and empirical legal studies to address key challenges of LAM: creating training datasets, developing reliable models, establishing reproducibility standards, and integrating LAM into legal research. The workshop aims to strengthen the emerging field of LAM and its role in empirical legal studies by sharing latest implementations, addressing core challenges, and establishing best practices.

The AMELR workshop is proudly hosted as part of ICAIL 2025 (Chicago) and is jointly organized by the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University and TrustHLT Group at Ruhr University Bochum and Technical University Darmstadt.

Invited Speakers

Important Dates

  • Early Draft Deadline (max. 8 pages): extended to May 1, 2025
  • Notification of Acceptance: May 15, 2025
  • Workshop Date: Full-day on June 20, 2025
  • Camera Ready Papers Submission for Archival-Track (max. 8 pages): June 30, 2025

All deadlines 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC -12).

The workshop will take place as part of ICAIL Conference in Chicago at Northwestern University and on-line.

Contact

For further questions please feel free to contact koref@c3s.uni-frankfurt.de

Program

Our workshop features two types of talks:

Invited Talks (30 minutes presentation + 10 min Q&A) and

Regular Talks (15 minutes presentation + 5 min Q&A)

You can check detailed program with abstracts here.

Program Summary:

  • 8:30 - 8:55 AM – Arrival & Setup
  • 8:55 AM – Opening Remarks
  • 9:00 AM – A Role for Legal Argument Schemes in LLMs and GenAI
    By Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh (Invited Talk)
  • 9:40 AM – Quantifying Judicial Reasoning: Large-Scale Measurement of Supreme Court Jurisprudence
    By Jed Stiglitz, Cornell Law School (Invited Talk)
  • 10:20 AM – Coffee Break
  • 10:40 AM – Legal Argument Mining: Recent Trends and Open Challenges
    By Rūta Liepiņa and colleagues
  • 11:00 AM – Dynamic Demonstrations Selection for Few-Shot Legal Argument Mining
    By Francesca Lagioia, Andrea Galassi and colleagues
  • 11:20 AM – Coffee Break
  • 11:40 AM – Legal Argument Mining and Empirical Legal Research: A Human-AI Interaction Perspective
    By Jaromir Savelka, Carnegie Mellon University (Invited Talk)
  • 12:20 PM – A Comprehensive Survey of Canon Usage at the Supreme Court, 1791–2025
    By Jonathan Choi, USC Gould School of Law (Invited Talk)
  • 1:00 PM – Lunch Break
  • 2:45 PM – Large Language Model Agents as Machini Moralis: Aligning AI with Economic and Moral Preferences
    By Daniel Chen, Harvard University (Invited Talk)
  • 3:25 PM – Decoding Green Justice: An AI-Assisted Exploration of Indian Environmental Rulings over Three Decades
    By Shareen Joshi and colleagues
  • 3:45 PM – Coffee Break
  • 4:05 PM – Improving Legal Question Answering through Structured Knowledge Representation
    By Frank Schilder and colleagues
  • 4:25 PM – Neuro-Symbolic Argument Mapping
    By Jason Morris
  • 4:45 PM – Coffee Break
  • 4:55 PM – Generating Legal Commentaries from Case Databases via Retrieval, Clustering, and Generation
    By Niklas Wais and colleagues
  • 5:15 PM – Rabula: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Brazilian Legal Tasks
    By Eduardo Caruso Barbosa Pacheco and colleagues
  • 5:35 PM – Closing Remarks
  • 6:30 – Informal Dinner

All times in Chicago Timezone, i.e. CDT (Central Daylight Time), UTC/GMT -5 hours.

Organizing Team

  • Tomas Koref (Center for Critical Computational Studies - C3S, Goethe University Frankfurt and Charles University)
  • Lena Held (TrustHLT Group, Technical University Darmstadt)
  • Ivan Habernal (TrustHLT, Ruhr University Bochum)

Program Committee

  • Katie Atkinson (University of Liverpool)
  • Wolfgang Alschner (University of Ottawa)
  • Christoph Burchard (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
  • Daniel Chen (Harvard University/Toulouse School of Economics)
  • Arthur Dyevre (KU Leuven)
  • Gijs van Dijck (Maastricht University)
  • Ivan Habernal (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
  • Jakub Harasta (Masaryk University)
  • Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
  • Tereza Novotna (Masaryk University)
  • Michal Ovadek (University College London)
  • Prakash Poudyal (Kathmandu University)
  • Jaromir Savelka (Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Michal Soltes (Charles University)
  • Bart Verheij (University of Groningen/Stanford University)

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