An Instructional Environment for Learning to Solve Legal Cases
PROblem Situations in Administrative law
Antoinette J. Muntjewerff (2001). An Instructional Environment for Learning to Solve Legal Cases PROSA
A session with PROSA
To get a basic idea of the functionality of the system we describe a session with PROSA. The description of the session is based on the recommended route. Starting PROSA brings us to the first screen which shows us the PROSA logo and four buttons.
There is a start PROSA button, an explain PROSA button, an info PROSA button and a stop PROSA button. The start PROSA button brings us to the data request screen where we have to insert our name and student number. This is required so PROSA can keep our individual record. When we indicated that we are ready the PROSA screen appears (see Fig. 6.6).
Imagine we are sitting in front of PROSA.
Figure 6.6: The instructional environment in PROSA.
The first we have to do is to select a legal case from the set of available legal cases using the menu button legal case. The legal cases in PROSA are arranged by topic. We decide to select a case with topic interested party from the list of topics that pops up. Within each topic the legal cases are arranged by level of difficulty. We decide to select difficulty level easy from the list.
The situation description selected is then presented in the upper layer in the legal case window (e.g. the Dapper Market case) (see Fig. 6.7). At the same time the question that belongs to the situation description is presented in the upper layer in the construct legal solution window (e.g. Is Alexander Boer an interested party according to the General Administrative Law Act?). We now select the menu button process in the upper layer in the construct legal solution window. The list with the two activities select and match pops up. Being presented with a legal case the next thing to do is to select either a legal rule or a fact from the legal case. So to start constructing the legal solution we have to choose the select option. This results in a change in the construct legal solution screen. The distinction between selecting a legal rule from the set of available legal rules and selecting a fact from the situation description is now visualized. There also appears a specific part in the construct legal solution window that is titled legal solution. This is where we have to put our intermediate results to construct our legal solution. We select a legal rule by choosing the legal rules button in the upper layer in the legal rules window. This button shows the three different categories of legal rules: statutes, other regulations and case law. Within the statute option a further classification of statutes is made based on the area of law the statutes belong to. We choose the option statutes from the legal rules button and then select the act we think applicable given the specific legal case and question to be answered. This act is presented in the legal rules window (e.g. the General Act of Administrative Law). We now have to select an applicable article from this act. This article has to be copied to the construct legal solution window, in the specific part select legal rule (e.g. Interested party means the person whose interest is directly affected by an order). We may bring the article to the legal solution using the product option bring to solution. We now have to select an article component from the article (e.g. the person) and a fact from the situation description to be matched to the article component (e.g. Alexander Boer). We have to use the match option available in the process button to link the article component to the fact. The match option shows us the available link operators that we can use.
Because we argue that the person is Alexander Boer we opt for the operator '='. Our match is automatically put into the legal solution (e.g. the person = Alexander Boer). We have to repeat the select activity until there are no statutes, articles, article components and facts left. The match activity has to be repeated until there are no more article components or facts.
At that stage we have to formulate the final answer to the question. We choose the option formulate answer in the menu button product and select what we think is the right answer (e.g. A. Boer is not an interested party in the meaning of the GALA). One by one the various elements where put on the screen. At this point we are facing the following screen (see Fig. 6.7).
Figure
6.7: Construct legal solution.
We
notice that up till now all materials are presented in the windows of the upper
layer. This indicates that we did not request an assessment or an elaboration
and that there also was no need for PROSA to correct us.
Figure
6.8: Presentation of the elaboration.
Therefore we now assume that we do not know where to start when we are confronted with the Dapper Market case.
We understand that we have to find out if Alexander Boer is an interested party in the meaning of the GALA, however, we do not know where we may find the legal knowledge. We therefore decide to ask for an elaboration by using the support button of the legal case window in the lower layer. The buttons have different options available as a list of concepts and a topic model. We select the 'list of concepts' option resulting in the presentation of an alphabetical list of terms used in the domain of practice. After selecting the term 'interested party' we get a description of the article components (the legal terms) and a reference to the legal rule. When we click on this reference the legal rule is presented in the lower layer of the legal rules window (see Fig. 6.8).
We
not only may ask for elaborations, we may also ask for an assessment of our
(intermediate) results using the assess button in the construct legal solution
window. The two types of assessment available are sub assessment and final
assessment. When we are sure we want to quit working on the particular case we
may ask a final assessment, however, when we want to proceed but also want to
have feedback on how we are doing we may ask for a sub assessment. The final
assessment will present an overview of what we did right and what we did wrong
subdivided to process and product, and within the product specifying the status
of the components, component order and answer. A sub assessment gives us the
opportunity to get separate feedback on our route (process) and on our
constructed solution (product). We may request an assessment any time we want.
Fig. 6.9 shows a sub assessment of our product.
Figure
6.9: Presentation of the assessment.
When we want to quit working with PROSA we select the stop button which brings us to the stop screen. Here we have different options. We may
exit PROSA, we may go back to working with PROSA and we may, before we select one of these options, ask to look at our results. When we choose to look at our results we are presented with our PROSA history. This overview shows how many sessions we had with PROSA, how many cases we solved in each session specified to the topic and difficulty level and for the most recent session it specifies for each case our achievements both on product and process.