Professor Radboud Winkels
My name is Radboud Winkels and I am associate professor in Computational Legal Theory at the Law Faculty of the UvA. My background is in Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. I coordinate the course on “Reasoning and Formal Modelling” and chair the Program Committee of Forensic Science.
I try to understand law and legal reasoning better by formalizing it and putting it in (smart) computer programs. This way I can test my theories of how law works and legal scholars think by ‘running’ my programs and seeing whether they ‘behave’ as humans do (or better!). This is also possible in the forensic field. If we ‘model’ the process of forensic and evidential reasoning, we can perhaps improve it, help people to avoid common pitfalls and make better decisions.
Formalizing law and legal reasoning is a difficult, time consuming and error-prone process. Part of my research is dedicated to trying to automate that process. For instance by using natural language techniques to transform legal texts to representations a machine can handle.
Another area of current research is applying network analysis techniques to the legal field, on the one hand to analyse social networks of people (e.g. legal scholars or criminals) and on the other hand the network of sources of law. Legislation refers to other legislation, case law to legislation etc. and this network can be analysed to find for instance the most important court decisions or problematic pieces of law. Networks of criminals can be analysed to find central figures, organized crime, recurring patterns, etc.