RELEASE


In the third week of May, one hundred international researchers and
scholars of artificial intelligence and law will arrive in St. Louis
for a five-day conference.  For three days, there will be a technical
paper program at the Washington University Law School (Anheuser Busch
Hall Moot Court Room) with opportunities for software demonstrations.
On Monday, the 21st, there will be tutorials in Eads Hall of Washington
University.  On Friday, the 25th, there will be workshops (also in Eads
Hall).  The program typically includes experimental work on expert
systems, automated legal reasoning, advanced judicial support systems,
conceptual legal information retrieval, computational models of legal
reasoning and argumentation, applications of machine learning to law,
automated extraction of information from legal texts, and similar
topics.  There will be Missouri CLE credit for the tutorials.

The conference is the main event of the IAAIL, and has been held in the
past in Boston (1987), Vancouver (1989), Oxford (1991), Amsterdam
(1993), Washington, D.C., (1995), Melbourne (1997), and Oslo (1999).
This year's conference is co-sponsored by the Washington University
Department of Computer Science, the School of Law, and the Program on
Legal Studies, and by WestGroup, Thomson Legal and Regulatory.  It is
held in cooperation with ACM, the society for computing professionals,
and AAAI, the society for researchers in artificial intelligence.

The invited speakers will be Frederick Schauer, Stanton Professor at
Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government; Kevin D.
Ashley, Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law
and Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center;
and Benjamin Grosof, MIT Sloan Professor in E-Commerce Information
Technology, and recently the leader of the business rules E-Commerce
group at IBM.  The invited banquet speaker is Senator Barack Obama,
Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago School of Law in
Constitutional Law, and state legislator of Illinois.  Professor
Schauer is one of the leading authorities on Constitutional Law, and
the author of PLAYING BY THE RULES, which presages much of the relation
between AI and Law and the philosophy of law.  Senator Obama is
celebrated as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law
Review and is one of the rising political stars in the region.
Professor Ashley is a former National Science Foundation Presidential
Young Investigator, and the designer of the programs HYPO and CATO,
which have been tested for their performance against law school
students.

The conference organizers welcome registration by interested local
practitioners, scholars, and technologists.  In the past, the legal
communities of the host cities have strongly contributed to the
conference.  There will be a 1-day registration particularly targeted
to the local audience.  The registration fees are aimed at recovering
costs, as is the practice for academic conferences.  The website for
the conference is http://cs.wustl.edu/icail2001/ which will have
registration and hotel information.

The announced workshops are:

	Legal Knowledge Systems in Action: Practical AI in Today's Law Offices;
	Workshop on Legal Evidence;
	Workshop on Regulated Electronic Societies;

and announced tutorials are:

	Introduction to AI and Law, Kevin Ashley and Carole Hafner,
		University of Pittsburgh and Northeastern University;
	XML and Emerging Legal XML Standards by Laurence Leff, Western
		Illinois University;
	Search Strategies for On-Line Legal Research, Virginia Wise, 
		Harvard Law School;
	Technical and legal issues in E-Commerce, John Zeleznikow and 
		Andrew Stranieri, La Trobe University (Australia);

and the main conference will have a panel on AI and Law and
jurisprudence (closely related to the U. Chicago Law Roundtable
Symposium last November).

The conference is now soliciting additional sponsorship from local
professional law associations, large law firms, and legal institutions.

This release was prepared by R. P. Loui, loui@cs.wustl.edu
(314)-935-6102, the local contact for this conference.