Books by Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis
Papers by Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021, 2021
Natural language processing (NLP) methods for analyzing legal text offer legal scholars and pract... more Natural language processing (NLP) methods for analyzing legal text offer legal scholars and practitioners a range of tools allowing to empirically analyze law on a large scale. However, researchers seem to struggle when it comes to identifying ethical limits to using NLP systems for acquiring genuine insights both about the law and the systems' predictive capacity. In this paper we set out a number of ways in which to think systematically about such issues. We place emphasis on three crucial normative parameters which have, to the best of our knowledge, been underestimated by current debates: (a) the importance of academic freedom, (b) the existence of a wide diversity of legal and ethical norms domestically but even more so internationally and (c) the threat of moralism in research related to computational law. For each of these three parameters we provide specific recommendations for the legal NLP community. Our discussion is structured around the study of a real-life scenario that has prompted recent debate in the legal NLP research community.
Complexity Theory and Law, 2018
Legislated Rights is a welcome contribution to constitutional theory. The book’s overall aim is t... more Legislated Rights is a welcome contribution to constitutional theory. The book’s overall aim is to rehabilitate the role of legislation and legislatures in ‘securing human rights’ (p. 1). 1 A major...
The aim of this paper is to explore the role of judicial policies relating to research in and pat... more The aim of this paper is to explore the role of judicial policies relating to research in and patenting of the life-sciences and new health technologies in the EU in the light of renewed calls for greater European Integration. Legal regulation of new biotechnologies reflects a plurality of conflicting national policies and laws on controversial issues, such as stem cell research, which often involve deeply held moral and religious beliefs that reflect the diversity of values and cultural identities in Europe. Our argument involves three steps. First, EU regulation of new biotechnologies is undertaken under conditions of what is widely perceived as a ‘democratic deficit’ in the Union. Secondly, the Union’s fundamental values, which are contained in the Treaties as well as key texts such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, are based on open-ended principles such as human dignity to accommodate this moral diversity (Plomer & Tsarapatsanis, 2013). Thirdly, the CJEU (hereinaf...
Research Methods for International Human Rights Law, 2019
Laws, 2021
The aim of the article is to propose and defend a distinctively political reading of the European... more The aim of the article is to propose and defend a distinctively political reading of the European Convention of Human Rights. Drawing on a range of different sources, my core claim is that realistically construed considerations of political legitimacy, stemming from the institutional context within which ECtHR judges operate, can explain and justify a morally non-ideal understanding of Convention rights on the part of the Court. I call the kind of non-ideal reading of the ECHR that I defend ‘political’ because it results from distinctive concerns regarding the Court’s legitimacy in a wider context marked by the circumstances of politics, broadly understood. These concerns depend on apprehending the ECHR as a distinctive institutional-cum-legal regime or system whose stability has political underpinnings. Tackling them requires resorting to some form of political judgment aimed at working out how various normative parameters, including legitimacy and stability, interact with a morall...
Human Rights Between Law and Politics : The Margin of Appreciation in Post-National Contexts
This is a repository copy of The Margin of Appreciation as an Underenforcement Doctrine.
PeerJ Computer Science, 2016
Recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning provide us with the tools to ... more Recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning provide us with the tools to build predictive models that can be used to unveil patterns driving judicial decisions. This can be useful, for both lawyers and judges, as an assisting tool to rapidly identify cases and extract patterns which lead to certain decisions. This paper presents the first systematic study on predicting the outcome of cases tried by the European Court of Human Rights based solely on textual content. We formulate a binary classification task where the input of our classifiers is the textual content extracted from a case and the target output is the actual judgment as to whether there has been a violation of an article of the convention of human rights. Textual information is represented using contiguous word sequences, i.e., N-grams, and topics. Our models can predict the court’s decisions with a strong accuracy (79% on average). Our empirical analysis indicates that the formal facts of a case ...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013
ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to explore the role of judicial policies relating to research i... more ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to explore the role of judicial policies relating to research in and patenting of the life-sciences and new health technologies in the EU in the light of renewed calls for greater European integration. Legal regulation of new biotechnologies reflects a plurality of conflicting national policies and laws on controversial issues, such as stem cell research, which often involve deeply held moral and religious beliefs that reflect the diversity of national values and cultural identities in Europe. Our argument involves three steps. First, EU regulation of new biotechnologies is undertaken under conditions of what is widely perceived as a ‘democratic deficit’ in the Union. Secondly, the Union’s fundamental values, which are contained in the Treaties as well as key texts such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, are based on open-ended principles such as human dignity to accommodate this moral diversity (Plomer & Tsarapatsanis, 2013). Thirdly, the Court of Justice of the European Union plays a critical role in the determination of the balance between the Union’s central values and the diversity of national values. Yet, the role and fitness of the Court to discharge the role of arbiter in this constitutionally charged field has been little scrutinized. We suggest that the political and legal tensions between the Union and Member States are particularly acute in the field of biotechnology and require fundamental reforms of EU institutions, notably the Court, to protect the democratic ideal.
Ratio Juris
The article explores the claim that representative legislatures should create general legal norms... more The article explores the claim that representative legislatures should create general legal norms. After distinguishing the requirement that statutes be general from the broader rule-of-law idea that law be general, I concentrate on the French constitutional tradition to argue that the plausibility of the claim turns on the elucidation of a set of social norms and understandings about the proper role of representative legislatures mediating between abstract ideals of the common good and local practices. I call these norms grammars. The article then briefly compares the French ‘Sieyesian’ grammar of political representation with the US ‘Madisonian’ one regarding the issue of generality of statutes and concludes with a plea for deeper comparative investigation into different such grammars.
Natural language processing (NLP) methods for analyzing legal text offer legal scholars and pract... more Natural language processing (NLP) methods for analyzing legal text offer legal scholars and practitioners a range of tools allowing to empirically analyze law on a large scale. However, researchers seem to struggle when it comes to identifying ethical limits to using NLP systems for acquiring genuine insights both about the law and the systems' predictive capacity. In this paper we set out a number of ways in which to think systematically about such issues. We place emphasis on three crucial normative parameters which have, to the best of our knowledge, been underestimated by current debates: (a) the importance of academic freedom, (b) the existence of a wide diversity of legal and ethical norms domestically but even more so internationally and (c) the threat of moralism in research related to computational law. For each of these three parameters we provide specific recommendations for the legal NLP community. Our discussion is structured around the study of a real-life scenario that has prompted recent debate in the legal NLP research community.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Res Publica
This paper grapples with Bernard Williams's prima vista enigmatic assertion that '[w]hether it is... more This paper grapples with Bernard Williams's prima vista enigmatic assertion that '[w]hether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions'. Though Williams's approach to thinking about human rights has a number of affinities with other 'political' and 'minimalist' understandings, we highlight its distinctive features and argue that it has significant implications for our understanding of human rights along a number of key dimensions. We then proceed to explain how Williams's way of thinking about human rights coheres with certain aspects of the reasoning of one of the most important international human rights courts, to wit, the European Court of Human Rights. This lends further plausibility to the view that a politically realistic understanding of human rights, of the kind urged by Williams, should be taken seriously, since it is a plausible candidate for the explanation of important aspects of human rights practices. We close by examining the suggestion that thinking in these terms is worryingly conservative. Keywords Bernard Williams • Human rights • European Convention of Human Rights • Legitimacy • Political realism • Political judgement In his essay 'Human Rights and Relativism', Bernard Williams declares that 'Whether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions' (Williams 2005, p. 72). At first blush, this remark appears enigmatic and infuriating. Why cannot we distinguish between the philosophical merit of considering x a violation of a person's human rights and the political * Edward Hall
European Journal of Political Theory
In 2010 Martin Loughlin published his opus magnum Foundations of Public Law (hereafter FPL) 1 , t... more In 2010 Martin Loughlin published his opus magnum Foundations of Public Law (hereafter FPL) 1 , the culmination of years of intensive research on the topics of public law and constitutional theory. 2 In Loughlin's own words, FLP set out to historically reconstruct the conceptual formation of public law by venturing into a discipline that Loughlin calls 'political jurisprudence', i.e. 'a discipline that explains the way in which governmental authority is constituted' (Questioning the Foundations of Public Law, hereafter QF, p.15). According to Loughlin, FLP represents the 'diachronic' counterpart to his more 'synchronic' previous book The Idea of Public Law. In that book, Loughlin had provided an account of the basic concepts that should inform the distinctive kind of inquiry into public law that political jurisprudence enables, albeit without delving into issues pertaining to those concepts' historical origin. In QF, co-edited by Michael Wilkinson and Michael Dowdle, is a rich collection of important papers by leading experts whose aim is to critically probe Loughlin's contributions in FPL from a number of different perspectives. Helpfully, the book contains a chapter by Loughlin which provides a concise account of the latest iteration of his position. It also comprises his brief reactions to the chapters. QF begins with a useful introduction by Wilkinson and Dowdle. It summarizes the main argument of FPL and then helpfully divides chapters into four sections representing thematically similar forms of critique. In the review that follows I shall, first, provide some theoretical context by placing emphasis on the conceptual space that Loughlin's 'political jurisprudence' aims to occupy within contemporary legal theory. Then, I shall briefly present the main arguments of the chapters of the book, before I focus, specifically, on a more sustained critical discussion of the so-called 'material critique' of Loughlin's project. Political Jurisprudence in Contemporary Legal Thought On the basis of the historical reconstruction provided by FPL, Loughlin defends two controversial positions, which shall be at the heart of the ensuing critical discussion. The first is the idea that political jurisprudence is the only discipline that can shed proper light on the distinctively autonomous structure of public law under the social and historical conditions of modernity. The second involves the notion that restoring political jurisprudence to its rightful place is an exercise in retrieval. This is so because the forgotten discipline of political jurisprudence, at least since the end of the nineteenth century, has been displaced, on the one hand, by the different schools of legal positivism, of which Hans Kelsen and H.L.A. Hart are the most eminent proponents 5 and, on the other hand, by various forms of anti-positivist theories, the most sophisticated and influential of which is undoubtedly Ronald Dworkin's. 6 Positivist theories, roughly, make the content of law depend solely on 'posited' norms, whose existence can be established as a matter of social fact. On positivist views, there is no necessary connection between (public) law and (true) morality. Whether such a connection exists depends solely on the contingent underlying social facts that determine the content and structure of public law. 7 Moreover, positivists such as Kelsen often argue that the only epistemologically respectable form that a 'science of law' may take is that of a value-free description of normatively pertinent 5 References. 6 Reference. 7 Caveat for 'exclusive' positivism here.
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 2021
Interpretability or explainability is an emerging research field in NLP. From a user-centric poin... more Interpretability or explainability is an emerging research field in NLP. From a user-centric point of view, the goal is to build models that provide proper justification for their decisions, similar to those of humans, by requiring the models to satisfy additional constraints. To this end, we introduce a new application on legal text where, contrary to mainstream literature targeting word-level rationales, we conceive rationales as selected paragraphs in multi-paragraph structured court cases. We also release a new dataset comprising European Court of Human Rights cases, including annotations for paragraph-level rationales. We use this dataset to study the effect of already proposed rationale constraints, i.e., sparsity, continuity, and comprehensiveness, formulated as regularizers. Our findings indicate that some of these constraints are not beneficial in paragraph-level rationale extraction, while others need re-formulation to better handle the multi-label nature of the task we consider. We also introduce a new constraint, singularity, which further improves the quality of rationales, even compared with noisy rationale supervision. Experimental results indicate that the newly introduced task is very challenging and there is a large scope for further research.
Δηµήτρης Τσαραπατσάνης, Λέκτορας στη Νοµική Σχολή του Πανεπιστηµίου του Σέφιλντ
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Books by Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis
Papers by Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis