Logic In The Theory And Practice Of Lawmaking

This book presents the current state of the art regarding the application of logical tools to the problems of theory and practice of lawmaking. It shows how contemporary logic may be useful in the analysis of legislation, legislative drafting and legal reasoning concerning different contexts of law making. Elaborations of the process of law making have variously emphasised its political, social or economic aspects. Yet despite strong interest in logical analyses of law, questions remains about the role of logical tools in law making. This volume attempts to bridge that gap, or at least to narrow it, drawing together some important research problems—and some possible solutions—as seen through the work of leading contemporary academics. The volume encompasses 20 chapters written by authors from 16 countries and it presents diversified views on the understanding of logic (from strict mathematical approaches to the informal, argumentative ones) and differentiated choices concerning the aspects of law making taken into account. The book presents a broad set of perspectives, insights and results into the emerging field of research devoted to the logical analysis of the area of creation of law. How does logic inform lawmaking? Are legal systems consistent and complete? How can legal rules be represented by means of formal calculi and visualization techniques? Does the structure of statutes or of legal systems resemble the structure of deductive systems? What are the logical relations between the basic concepts of jurisprudence that constitute the system of law? How are theories of legal interpretation relevant to the process of legislation? How might the statutory text be analysed by means of contemporary computer programs? These and other questions, ranging from the theoretical to the immediately practical, are addressed in this definitive collection.

What is effective legislation? Is it a matter of intuition, luck or the result of evidence based law making? Can it be consciously ‘engineered’? This book advances the novel idea that legislative effectiveness is the result of complex ‘mechanics’ in the conceptualisation, design and drafting of four elements inherent in every law: purpose, content, context and results. It concludes that effectiveness can be achieved with conceptual and methodological insights that guide the specific choices of lawmakers when designing and drafting legislation.

In recent years, interest within the research community and the legal industry regarding technological advances in legal knowledge representation and processing has been growing. This relates to areas such as computational models of legal reasoning, cybersecurity, privacy, trust and blockchain methods, among other things. This book presents the proceedings of JURIX 2022, the 35th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, held from 14 –16 December in Saarbrücken, Germany, under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems and hosted by Saarland University. The annual JURIX conference has become an international forum for academics and professionals to exchange knowledge and experiences at the intersection of law and artificial intelligence (AI). For this edition, 62 submissions were received from 163 authors in 24 countries. Following a rigorous review process, carried out by a programme committee of 72 experts recognised in the field, 14 submissions were selected for publication as long papers, 22 as short papers and 5 as demo papers, making a total of 41 papers altogether and representing a 22.5% acceptance rate for long papers (66.1% overall). The broad array of topics covered includes argumentation and legal reasoning, legal ontologies and the semantic web, machine and deep learning and natural language processing for legal knowledge extraction, as well as argument mining, translation of legal texts, defeasible logic, legal compliance, explainable AI, alternative dispute resolution, legal drafting and smart contracts. Providing an overview of recent advances, the book will be of interest to all those working at the interface between the law and AI.

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.

This pioneering study examines the process of reasoning in Islamic law. Some of the key questions addressed here include whether sacred law operates differently from secular law, why laws change or stay the same and how different cultural and historical settings impact the development of legal rulings. In order to explore these questions, the author examines the decisions of thirty jurists from the largest legal tradition in Islam: the Hanafi school of law. He traces their rulings on the question of women and communal prayer across a very broad period of time - from the eighth to the eighteenth century - to demonstrate how jurists interpreted the law and reconciled their decisions with the scripture and the sayings of the Prophet. The result is a fascinating overview of how Islamic law has evolved and the thinking behind individual rulings.

With newly uncovered personal papers, this volume offers in-depth analysis of Wesley Hohfeld's pioneering contributions to legal theory.

This book constitutes extended, revised, and selected papers from the JSAI annual conference, JSAI 2022, and the 14th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, JSAI-isAI 2022, held in Kyoto, Japan, in June 2022. The 18 full papers were carefully selected from 67 submissions and presented during the two events: 16th International Workshop on Juris-informatics, JURISIN 2022, and JSAI 2022 Intenational Session. This papers present discussion on fundamental and practical issues in Juris-informatics among researchers from various backgrounds such as law, social science, information and intelligent technology, logic, and philosophy, including the conventional AI and Law area.

This handbook addresses legal reasoning and argumentation from a logical, philosophical and legal perspective. The main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and are analysed in connection with more general types (and problems) of reasoning. Accordingly, the subject matter of the handbook divides in three parts. The first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the general structures and procedures of reasoning and argumentation that are relevant to legal discourse. The third one looks at their instantiations and developments of these aspects of argumentation as they are put to work in the law, in different areas and applications of legal reasoning.