Modular Argumentation For Modelling Legal Doctrines in Common Law of Contract

To create a programming environment in which autonomous agents could be built to resolve contract disputes, we propose an extension of assumption-based argumentation (ABA) into modular assumption-based argumentation (MABA) in which different modules of argumentation representing different knowledge bases for reasoning about beliefs and facts and for representation and reasoning with the legal doctrines could be built and assembled together. A distinct novel feature of modular argumentation in compare with other modular logic-based systems like Prolog is that it allows references to different semantics in the same module at the same time, a feature critically important for application of argumentation in legal domains like contract dispute resolution where the outcomes of court cases often depend on whether credulous or skeptical modes of reasoning were applied by the contract parties. We apply the new framework to model the doctrines of contract breach and mutual mistake.