ABSTRACT
When a judge determines a sentence for a criminal case, he must sift through facts about the crime and the criminal, arguments from the opposing lawyers, reactions from the victims, and the relevant sentencing statutes. The aim of the JUDGE project is to describe the content of this kind of common-sense ethical reasoning and implement it in a computer program. JUDGE uses about 15 justification units simultaneously to flesh out a causal account of a crime and determine whose actions were and were not justified. To constrain the search space of possible causal completions, explanations that fall at the extremes of justificational severity become the best candidates for the opposing lawyers to adopt, and for the judge to anticipate.
