AI4Legs 2023: AI for Legislation

Join with 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law - ICAIL 2023

  • Date: 23 JUNE 2023  from 9:00 to 18:00

  • Event location: Braga, Portugal

Objectives

Can the Law be written by GPT-4?[1] Can the members of the parliament use ChatGPT for improving their knowledge of the society needs? Can the Law be converted into programming code using AI/ML and logic formulae without losing legal theory principles, legal linguistic expressivity, and Constitutional principles? Can the digital format of Law be equally valid and considered a legitimate Legal Source, and under which conditions? Can a whole Legal System –including its diachronic dimension – be managed in a digital manner by using knowledge Graphs, Semantic Web techniques, Legal ontologies, Logic theory? Can a such translation be made automatically executable using Smart Contracts and immediately enforceable? How to render the “Law as Code” to the common citizen in a simple, yet transparent and accountable manner? Can an explicit normative statement be expressed natively in code or in non-linguistic signs (e.g., icons)? Which principles are necessary in order to not compress the Rule of Law and Democratic principles? What new legal theory is needed for a deep digital transformation of the legislative process that produces a digital format of Law with an innovative generative and constitutive modality instead of converting text (logos) into code? How to produce Law in non-textual norms while preserving normativity? How to improve the legislative process using AI/ML for better regulation?[2]

 

This workshop would like to discuss these challenging questions with interdisciplinary instruments coming from philosophy of law, Constitutional law, legal informatics including AI&Law, computational linguistics, computer science, HCI and Legal design. We intend also to discuss the state of the art of the most advanced applications of AI in support of the better regulation, law-making system, aims to find answers to these questions using.

 


 [1] Bommarito, Michael James and Katz, Daniel Martin, GPT Takes the Bar Exam (December 29, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4314839 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4314839

[2] Palmirani, M., Vitali, F., Van Puymbroeck, W., and Nubla Durango, F. (2022). Legal Drafting in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Digitisation. European Commission.

 

 

Key issues

During the COVID-19 emergency we were confronted with a flooding of regulations enacted by many Governments in order to manage the pandemic event, often followed by a sequence of amendments according to the evolution of the situation (in Italy, the Government and the Parliament approved approximately 300 regulations with different hierarchical levels, the EU institutions emitted 77 legislative documents, the Government of New Zealand[3] started “Using Rules as Code during COVID-19”[4]). We assist the same legislative phenomena in the current energy crises where data are leading the political decisions and a quick response by the legislative bodies is fundamental.

 

Four urgent requirements were stressed and remarked by the current democracies during emergency crises (e.g., energy crises, Ukraine war, immigrant policy):

1) to manage the digital legislative norms (especially in emergency status) in the light of the democratic and constitutional principles with particular attention to legitimacy, transparency, accessibility, accountability, timing;

2) to have digital modelling of the norms capable to quickly interact with digital society, institutions and informatics system artefacts (e.g., IoT fitness token, health informatic systems, apps for contact tracing, etc.);

3) to enforce executable legal norms with legal effects and to measure the effectiveness in order to react and change rapidly direction in case of evolution of the society;

4) to explain the law-making process in transparent way to the citizens and to permit effective and digital eParticipation by the stakeholders.

 

In all these cases the use of AI in the legislative process could provide great benefits in the correct theoretical framework in the ex-ante approach, in order to introduce the AI during the legislative process and not limited to the legal document modelling ex-post.

 


[3] https://serviceinnovationlab.github.io/projects/legislation-as-code/

[4] https://oecd-opsi.org/using-rules-as-code-during-covid-19/

 

 

Topics

• Fundamental legal concepts and principles concerning the eLegislation

• Theory of law and ICT in the legislative process

• Legal XML and XML Rules for the legislative process

• Generative AI in the legislative process

• AI/ML for Legislative Process

• Government Linked Open Data (GLOD)

• Legal ontologies and legal knowledge graphs for better regulation

• Smart Data and the Semantic Web in legislative domain

• Governance and deliberative models of democracy using AI

• Blockchain distributed ledger technology for law-making process

• Visualization of legal knowledge for transparency in legislative domain

• NLP tools for capturing legal knowledge in legislative domain

• Legal language and NLP representation

• Legal design and visualization of the legislative knowledge

• Modelling the rule of law in the law-making process

• Interpretation modelling of legislation

• Data analytics for legislation

 


Important dates

Draft paper Springer LNAI format 10 pages: Extension to May 15th 2023 

Workshop presentation: 23rd June 2023 - 9.00AM-6.00PM

Notification of acceptance:  May 26th 2023

Camera ready (Springer LNAI): June 16th 2023

Publication (selected papers) LNAI: December 2023 in AICOL2023 volume

 

 

Submission guidelines

Papers should be in English and must be submitted at AI4Legs Easychair site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ai4legs2023

  • Position Papers (8 pages)
  • Full Papers (15 pages in the proceedings)
  • Min. 6000 words and max. 15000 words.
  • Please upload all submissions in LNCS-LNAI format

 

Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least by 3 PC members before being accepted for presentation at the Workshop.
A second peer review-round will be carried out before submission to the next AICOL volume at LNAI (end of 2023).

 


Chairs

Monica Palmirani (Research Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, ALMA-AI, University of Bologna

 

Programme Committee

Paulo H. C. Alves, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro

María Luisa Alvite Díez, Universidad de León

Floris Bex, Utrecht University

Pompeu Casanovas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Giuseppe Contissa, University of Bologna, ALMA-AI

Jaime Delgado, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Luigi Di Caro, University of Torino

Gijs van Dijck, Maastricht University

Nicoletta Fornara, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland

Enrico Francesconi, IGSG-CNR

Mercedes Martinez-Gonzalez, University of Valladolid

Guido Governatori, Independent researcher

Mustafa Hashmi, Data 61, CSIRO

Silvia Llorente, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Marco Manna, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Calabria

Grzegorz J. Nalepa, Jagiellonian University

Jose Palma, University of Murcia

Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna, ALMA-AI

Marta Poblet, RMIT University

Radim Polčák, Masaryk University

Shashishekar Ramakrishna, EY-AI Labs / Free University of Berlin

Livio Robaldo, Legal Innovation Lab Wales, University of Swansea

Giovanni Sartor, EUI/University of Bologna, ALMA-AI

Jaromir Savelka, Carnegie Mellon University

Piotr Skrzypczynski, Poznan University of Technology

Adam Wyner, Swansea University

John Zeleznikow, La Trobe University


Invited speakers:

  • Matthew Waddington, Legislative Drafting Office, States of Jersey
  • Willy Van Puymbroeck, European Commission, DG DIGIT
  • Elhanan Schwartz, eLaw Project Leader, Ministry of Justice, Israel
  • Matt Lynch, The National Archives, UK
  • Fotis Fitsilis, Hellenic Parliament
  • Carlo Marchetti, Senate of the Republic of Italy
  • Lorenzo Menconi, Chamber of Deputies of Italy
  • Claudio Fabiani, European Parliament
  • Günther Schefbeck, Austrian Parliament
  • Joao Alberto de Oliveira Lima, Senate of Brazil

Programme: 

  • 9.00-9.20 - Keynote speech

       Matthew Waddington, Legislative Drafting Office, States of Jersey

  • 9.20-12.20

      Elhanan Schwartz, eLaw Project Leader, Ministry of Justice, Israel
      Matt Lynch, The National Archives, UK
      Fotis Fitsilis, Hellenic Parliament
      Carlo Marchetti, Senate of the Republic of Italy
      Lorenzo Menconi, Chamber of Deputies of Italy
      Claudio Fabiani, European Parliament
      Günther Schefbeck, Austrian Parliament

  • 12.20-12.40 - Keynote speech

      Willy Van Puymbroeck, European Commission, DG DIGIT

Discussion

  • 14.00-16.00

      Marianna Molinari, Chiara Bonfanti and Ilaria Angela Amantea, Principles of law: approaching a functional extraction
     Jaromir Savelka, Kevin Ashley, Morgan Gray, Hannes Westermann and Huihui XuExplaining, Legal Concepts with Augmented Large Language Models    (GPT-4)
     Adam Wyner, Adeline Nazarenko and François Lévy, Towards Requirements for Digital Norms
     Joao Alberto de Oliveira Lima, Senate of Brazil
     Flores Bakker, Jeroen Breteler, Thom van Gessel, Tom van Engers and Robert van Doesburg, A Norm Engine Based On Semantic Web-Compliant Technology

Discussion

  


 

 

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