A Witness, Two Lawyers, and a Trial Judge Form Some Beliefs, Make Some Statements, and Shape a Lawsuit

Two Lawyers and a Judge Shape a Lawsuit

The Role of Decision Makers' Epistemic States (Inferences) & Speech Acts in the Formation of an Episode of a Legal Process such as Litigation

The Difficulty of Pretrial or Prelitigation Investigation and Planning

Question: Why is the investigation of and planning for a possible lawsuit and trial more difficult than planning and preparation in the somewhat-but-not-precisely comparable settings & situations mentioned (see below) by David B. Leake in Artificial Intelligence?

In real-world situations, it is seldom possible to generate a complete plan in advance and then execute it without changes. The state of the world may be imperfectly-known, the effects of actions may be uncertain, the world may change while the plan is being generated or executed, and the plan may require the coordination of multiple cooperating agents, or counterplanning to neutralize the interference of agents with opposing goals. Determining the state of the world and guiding action requires the ability to gather information about the world, though sensors such as sonar or cameras, and to interpret that information to draw conclusions (See MACHINE VISION). In addition, carrying out actions in a messy and changing world may require rapid responses to important events (e.g., for a robot-guided vehicle to correct a skid), or an ongoing process of rapidly selecting actions based on the current context (for example, when a basketball player must avoid an opponent). Such problems have led to research on reactive planning, as well as on how to integrate reactive methods with the deliberative methods providing long-term guidance (See ROBOTICS). The RoboCup Federation sponsors an annual series of competitions between robot soccer teams as a testbed for demonstrating new methods and extending the state of the art in robotics (www.robocup.org).

Wishes, Horses, and Group-to-Individual Inference

Take a gander at this -- if you wish: If Wishes Were Horses: Discursive Comments on Attempts to Prevent Individuals from Being Unfairly Burdened by their Reference Classes