Legal Informatics

El volumen 9 de la LEFIS Series celebra el 25 aniversario de BILETA (British & Irish Law, Education and Technology Association). En él, estudiosos internacionales pioneros en Informática y Derecho procedentes de universidades australianas, británicas, estadounidenses, holandesas, noruegas y españolas analizan los éxitos y desafíos en la aplicación de las tecnologías de información al Derecho y a la práctica legal.

This cutting-edge volume offers a theoretical and applied introduction to the emerging legal technology and informatics industry.

Both legal scholars and computer scientists will be curious to know how the gap between law and computing can be bridged. The law, and also jurisprudence, is based on language, and is mainly textual. Every syntactic system has its semantic range, and so does language, which in law achieves a high degree of professional precision. The use of visualisations is a syntactic supplement and opens up a new understanding of legal forms. This understanding was reinforced by the paradigm shift from textual law to legal informatics, in which visual formal notations are decisive. The authors have been dealing with visualisation approaches for a long time and summarise them here for discussion. In this book, a multiphase transformation from the legal domain to computer code is explored. The authors consider law enforcement by computer. The target view is that legal machines are legal actors that are capable of triggering institutional facts. In the visualisation of statutory law, an approach called Structural Legal Visualisation is presented. Specifically, the visualisation of legal meaning is linked with tertium comparationis, the third part of the comparison. In a legal documentation system, representing one legal source with multiple documents is viewed as a granularity problem. The authors propose to supplement legislative documents ex ante with explicit logic-oriented information in the form of a mini thesaurus. In contrast to so-called strong relations such as synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy/hyponymy, one should consider weak relations: (1) dialectical relations, a term of dialectical antithesis; (2) context relations; and (3) metaphorical relations, which means the use of metaphors for terms. The chapters trace topics such as the distinction between knowledge visualisation and knowledge representation, the visualisation of Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, the separation of law and legal science, legal subsumption, legal relations, legal machines, encapsulation, compliance, transparency, standard cases and hard cases.

The gap between information technology and the legal profession is narrowing, in particular due to the Internet and the richness of legal sources that can be found online. This book further bridges the gap by showing people with a legal background what is possible with Information Technology now and in the near future, as well as by showing people with an IT background what opportunities exist in the domain of law.

Informatics and the Foundations of Legal Reasoning represents a close collaboration between a wide range of disciplines and countries. Fourteen papers, together with a long analytical introduction by the editors, were selected from the contributions of legal theorists, computer scientists, philosophers and logicians who were members of an International Working Group supported by the European Commission. The Group was mandated to work towards determining how far the law is amenable to formal modeling, and in what ways computers might assist legal thinking and practice. The book is the result of discussions held by the Group over two and half years. It will help students and researchers from different backgrounds to focus on a common set of topics of increasing general interest. It embodies the results of work in progress and suggests many issues for further discussion. A stimulating text for undergraduate and graduate courses in law, philosophy and computer science departments, as well as for those interested in the place of computers in legal practice, especially at the international level.

In this book, Georgios N. Yannopoulos appropriately relates the developing field of knowledge based systems in law with the basis in classic philosophy, explicating relations which too often are not properly understood. The decision model developed by the author is important, as it integrates and explains arguments which often have been seen as imcompatible. The use of the theoretical foundation in describing and in giving a critical analysis of the construction of real knowledge bases systems becomes therefore very valuable.and’ Jon Bing, Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law and‘Expert systems in law have not been as easily achieved as was originally envisaged, because too many thought the task to be trivial and ignored the complex issues involved. Yannopoulosand’ work is valuable because he attempts to detail these issues and overcome them.and’ Philip Leith, Queenand’s University of Belfast and‘Yannopoulosand’ book addresses some of the most crucial problems in the field of information technology and law. The development of more advanced IT solutions for the legal sector will always be closely related to our ability to model and understand the legal reasoning process. In his analysis Yannopoulos elegantly integrates knowledge from many different areas, and in this respect the book reflects an all too seldom seen broadness.and’ Pete Wahlgren, The Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (IRI) and‘There has been an abundance of recent research on developing intelligent support systems. Dr Yannopoulosand’ work is especially significant because it examines the necessary legal background for building such systems. It will be an essential reference for the prospective builders of intelligent legal support systems.and’ John Zeleznikow, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia

In recent years the field of bioinformatics has emerged from the university research laboratory and entered the mainstream healthcare establishment. During this time there has been a rapid increase of legal developments affecting this dynamic field, from Supreme Court decisions radically altering the patentability of informatics inventions to major developments in privacy law both in Europe and the U.S. This edited book strives to offer the reader insight into some of the major legal trends and considerations applicable to these fields today.

by Roberto Cencioni At the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, European heads of state and government set a new goal for the European Union — to become the most competitive knowled- based society in the world by 2010. As part of this objective, ICT (information and communication technologies) services should become available for every citizen, and for all schools, homes and businesses. The book you have in front of you is about Semantic Web technology and law. Law is something omnipresent; all citizens — at some points in their lives — have to deal with it. In addition, law involves a large group of professionals, and is a mul- billion business world wide. Information technology is important because it that can improve citizens’ interaction with law, as well as improve legal professionals’ work environment. Legal professionals dedicate a significant amount of their time to finding, reading, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to take decisions, and prepare advice and trials, among other tasks. As part of the “Semantic-Based Knowledge and Content Systems” Strategic Objective, the European Commission is funding projects to construct technology to make the Semantic Web vision come true. 1 The articles in this book are related to two current foci of the Strategic Objective : • Knowledge acquisition and modelling, capturing knowledge from raw information and multimedia content in webs and other distributed repositories to turn poorly structured information into machi- processable knowledge.