How do case law and principles of law interact, computationally?

Precedents are increasingly viewed as binding in common law systems as well as in civil law systems. As case law tends to establish itself as a source of law by directly applying general principles of law (POL) to specific circum- stances, formal legality and respect for the actual language of the regulations have taken a backseat. POLs are the generalization of precedent-based rule interpreta- tion and application to a specific situation. They affect the reasoning behind de- cisions and, consequently, the schedule of the trial’s decision-making phase. For this reason, POLs must be identified as soon as feasible. It makes sense that arti- ficial intelligence (AI) may support initiatives to lower the backlog of court cases. From this angle, our attempt to address some initial experiments aimed at ap- proaching a basic methodology for a functional text identification of POLs and acquiring a computer based automatic extraction.