Case-based sentencing using a tree of legal concepts

The Judge's Apprentice is a case-based decision support system implemented and intended for use in Israeli criminal law to aid sentencing in cases of either robbery or rape. The system uses a sentencing tree, which is a hierarchical classification of 371 legal concepts relevant to criminal sentencing. Each leaf in this tree represents an index, which can be input for any case. The indexes are important for determining index similarity in the retrieval process and for computation of the proposed sentence. After retrieval of suitable cases and selection of the best case, we use a case-based quantitative evaluation as a formula for computing a verdict for the case at hand.