Professor of Law Vern R. Walker has posted to YouTube the first in a series of educational videos that he is producing, and which will appear on the Hofstra server in higher quality than YouTube provides. The videos use his default-logic framework to analyze, visualize and help automate legal reasoning. This introductory video explains why the rule of law requires legal rules, how such rules work, and what they look like from a logical perspective. It analyzes the structure of legal rules using the logical connectives AND, OR, and UNLESS. It shows us why the law, as a system of rules, nearly always expands and becomes more complicated.

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Future videos will explore such topics as extracting legal rules from statutes, regulations, and case opinions; assessing the probative value of evidence; and modeling the dynamics among rules, evidence, policies, and legal principles.