This volume contains the proceedings of the seventeenth Jurix conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Jurix 2004), which was held at the Harnack Haus of the Max Planck Society, in Berlin, Germany. Although the Jurix conference moved from The Netherlands to Germany, almost half of the papers are from The Netherlands. Except for a paper from Canada, the others are from 5 other countries in Western Europe. The effort to extend Jurix beyond The Netherlands and establish it as the leading European conference on legal knowledge systems is making progress. The papers in this publication focus on the topics of legal knowledge management and information retrieval; legal knowledge acquisition using natural language processing; legal ontologies; case-based reasoning; reasoning about evidence and legal reasoning support.