Our AMELR workshop focuses on Legal Argument Mining (LAM) - using NLP to automatically detect legal arguments. Recent developments in NLP and LAM have provided legal scholars with a powerful tool for studying reasoning patterns, interpretative theories, and biases across jurisdictions and legal systems. The workshop gathers experts in computer science, AI & Law, legal theory, and empirical legal studies to address key challenges of LAM: creating training datasets, developing reliable models, establishing reproducibility standards, and integrating LAM into legal research. The workshop aims to strengthen the emerging field of LAM and its role in empirical legal studies by sharing latest implementations, addressing core challenges, and establishing best practices.

The AMELR workshop is proudly hosted as part of ICAIL 2025 and is jointly organized by the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C³S) at Goethe University and TrustHLT Group at Ruhr University Bochum and Technical University Darmstadt.

Important Dates

• Paper Deadline (Work-In-Progress, max. 5 pages): April 20, 2025
• Notification of Acceptance: May 15, 2025
• Camera Ready Papers Submission (max. 8 pages): June 5, 2025
• Workshop Date: June 16 or 20, 2025 (TBC)

Submission Guidelines

We invite unpublished work incl. early-stage research projects with preliminary findings.

• Template: Springer LNAI format (in English)
• Initial Submission: Max. 5 pages plus bibliography
• Submission Platform: EasyChair 

Successful candidates need to register for the ICAIL conference. 

All submissions undergo double-blind peer review by at least two program committee members. Evaluation criteria include:

• Novelty
• Contribution to the field
• Alignment with workshop themes
• Diversity

List of Topics

We welcome submissions on all aspects of legal argument mining, especially its intersection with empirical legal research.

This includes:

• Theoretical argumentation work relevant to empirical research or argument mining (e.g., argument structures and schemes, interpretation methods).
• Legal Argument Mining tasks and their intersections to empirical legal research (e.g., argument extraction, relation prediction).
• Gold standard datasets and annotations of legal documents (e.g., methodological concerns, practical tips for intercoder agreement or annotation guidelines).
• Model development, selection, fine-tuning and evaluation.
• Assessment and evaluation of legal reasoning and argument mining capabilities in (Large) Language Models.
• Novel applications of argument mining in empirical legal studies/legal dogmatics.
• Empirical analysis of data gained through Legal Argument Mining.
• Best practices for Legal Argument Mining Field and its use in empirical legal research (e.g. publishing data, code).
• Ethical considerations and future perspectives on LAM.

Committees

Program Committee

• Katie Atkinson (University of Liverpool)
• Wolfgang Alschner (University of Ottawa)
• Christoph Burchard (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
• Daniel Chen (Harvard University/Toulouse School of Economics)
• Arthur Dyevre (KU Leuven)
• Gijs van Dijck (Maastricht University)
• Ivan Habernal (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
• Jakub Harasta (Masaryk University)
• Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
• Tereza Novotna (Masaryk University)
• Michal Ovadek (University College London)
• Prakash Poudyal (Kathmandu University)
• Jaromir Savelka (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Michal Soltes (Charles University)
• Bart Verheij (University of Groningen/Stanford University)

Organizing committee

• Tomas Koref (Center for Critical Computational Studies - C³S, Goethe University Frankfurt and Charles University)
• Lena Held (TrustHLT Group, Technical University Darmstadt)
• Ivan Habernal (TrustHLT, Ruhr University Bochum)

Invited Speakers

• Kevin Ashley (University of Pittsburgh)
• Daniel Chen (Harvard University/Toulouse School of Economics)
• Jed Stiglitz (Cornell Law School)
• Jaromir Savelka (Carnegie Mellon University)
• TBC

Publication

TBC

Venue

The workshop will be held on June 16 or 20, 2025 (TBC) at Northwestern University, Chicago, IL & on-line.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to koref@c3s.uni-frankfurt.de