We intend to investigate the following field and to answer to the following research questions:
Legal text serialization is only one of the multiple representations of the legal normative content (e.g. oral, picture). The Law is a complex set of ingredients: the law-making process, legal actions, legal speech acts (e.g. text), political nuances (e.g. intention of the legislator), cultural elements (e.g. concepts change over time), the linguistic implicit background (e.g. new terms), different signifieds (e.g. interpretation), logic formula (e.g. commands). This project investigates the theoretical relationship between normative statements, textual provisions, logic formula, non-linguistic formats, and the programming coding of legal rules with the aim to define, and model, objectivity and subjectivity, explicit and implicit, linguistic and non-linguistic in relation of Legal Sources (e.g. Official Gazette). Autonomy is another important issue for defining a Smart legal order and a new concept of normativity in line with the digital society.
RQ1: Can we produce a solid theory of law that allows to produce legal sources and legal normative propositions in machine-consumable format valid, authentic, equally expressive and persistent over time with the same pre-eminence of textual linguistic acts? And under which theoretical principles and conditions is this possible, including the consolidation versions generated by the diachronic legal system (e.g. retroactive, suspensions, derogation, annulment)?
RQ2: Can we mitigate the reductionism that the logic formula serialisation of the legal norms can produce in order to preserve the flexibility of the different ontological signifieds in a diachronic process?
According to the legal hermeneutical approach, no meaning determination is ever understood to be fixed. A juridical decision can be rationally founded, and be subject to numerous constraints and criteria external to positive law and not derivable from the legal text with rigorous logical operations. In this sense a constitution is irreducible to a set of guidelines for future lawmakers demanding literal compliance.
The approach to start from the text to arrive to the code, or the opposite approach from the code to the text, do not consider the interpretation theory nor the realism nor the pragmatic experiences. We suggest integrating the two visions by proposing a new approach based on the interactive dialogue between software applications (text and code). While doing so, we also propose to implement explicability of the AI by relying on argumentation theory in order to inject interpretation values in the computable system. Computer science can help with its techniques (XML standards, Linked Open data, AI and Law, Legal reasoning, ML/DL, Extraction of the Knowledge, NLP and NER, Dialog and Interactive Systems, pattern detection, etc.) to model a framework where to include flexibility of interpretation to prevent the crystallisation of the law in rigid coding not sensitive to conditions (e.g. jurisdiction, time, social context).
RQ3: How can we produce a computer science framework (set of technical requirements) that includes also the legal hermeneutic principles in the formalization under programming (or logic or standard) of the Law?
RQ4: How can we make eLegal Systems dynamic over time and continuously using interactive dialogue with the context of the user (e.g. dynamic normative references over the time, link to correct legal concepts over time)?
We intend to investigate how constitutional and parliamentary law may support the coding of law; that is, the conditions under which RaC can be a legitimate, authentic, and official Legal Source (like the text in the Official Gazette). We also want to investigate the implications of this paradigm shift for all the legal system workflow, including the judiciary, and for the enforceability of the consumable-Law (Reichman 2021). In particular, it shall be questioned whether emerging technologies (e.g., smart contracts) allow automatic enforceability (e- enforceability).
RQ5: what are the constitutional and parliamentary foundations that make a machine- consumable approach in law-making system legally sustainable?
RQ6: what enforceability principles are necessary to make machine-consumable law automatically effective (e-enforceability)?
We want to investigate which simplification forms we can adopt in order to visualize the machine-consumable law in a human-consumable manner for implementing simplification, better regulation principles, transparency and accessibility. Visualization is another form of translation of the legal norms (like the logic formula and the language codification), so we need to understand which Human-Computer-Interaction instruments we can use in order to implement the Legal Design principles and preserve the normative message. Finally, we need to also investigate the role of “explicit non-linguistic norms.”
RQ7: Which foundations of philosophy of law and semiotics are necessary to preserve the ontological meaning of a legal norm when it is translated in visual symbols?
RQ8: Which Legal Design/HCI methods should we develop to make the law “better” and “simple” while at the same time not losing in semantic and in expressivity?
