Related papers: Specification languages for computational laws ver…
We analyse so-called computable laws, i.e., laws that can be enforced by automatic procedures. These laws should be logically perfect and unambiguous, but sometimes they are not. We use a regulation on road transport to illustrate this…
Legislation can be viewed as a body of prescriptive rules expressed in natural language. The application of legislation to facts of a case we refer to as statutory reasoning, where those facts are also expressed in natural language.…
Computational Law has begun taking the role in society which has been predicted for some time. Automated decision-making and systems which assist users are now used in various jurisdictions, but with this maturity come certain caveats.…
Rules are pervasive in the law. In the context of computer engineering, the translation of legal text to algorithmic form is seemingly direct. In large part, law may be a ripe field for expert systems and machine learning. For engineers,…
If code is law, then the language of law is a programming language. Lawyers and legal scholars can learn about law by studying programming-language theory, and programming-language tools can be usefully applied to legal problems. This…
Law at large underpins modern society, codifying and governing many aspects of citizens' daily lives. Oftentimes, law is subject to interpretation, debate and challenges throughout various courts and jurisdictions. But in some other areas,…
Checking the compliance of software against laws, regulations and contracts is increasingly important and costly as the embedding of software into societal practices is becoming more pervasive. Moreover, the digitalised services provided by…
Using dedicated software to represent or enact legislation or regulation has the advantage of solving the inherent ambiguity of legal texts and enabling the automation of compliance with legal norms. On the other hand, the so-called…
Legal interpretation is a linguistic venture. In judicial opinions, for example, courts are often asked to interpret the text of statutes and legislation. As time has shown, this is not always as easy as it sounds. Matters can hinge on…
Knowledge representation and reasoning in law are essential to facilitate the automation of legal analysis and decision-making tasks. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on legal science, specifically legal taxonomy, for…
Formal software specification is known to enable early error detection and explicit invariants, yet it has seen limited industrial adoption due to its high notation overhead and the expertise required to use traditional formal languages.…
Formalizing legal provisions promises machine-accessible law and automated legal reasoning, and recent LLMs make it tempting to generate such formalizations directly from statutory text. However, any formalization makes implicit…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…
Autonomous vehicles need to be designed to abide by the same rules that humans follow. This is challenging, because traffic rules are fuzzy and not well defined, making them incomprehensible to machines. Satisfaction cannot be incorporated…
Writing specifications for computer programs is not easy since one has to take into account the disparate conceptual worlds of the application domain and of software development. To bridge this conceptual gap we propose controlled natural…
In order to work with mathematical content in computer systems, it is necessary to represent it in formal languages. Ideally, these are supported by tools that verify the correctness of the content, allow computing with it, and produce…
We are currently unable to specify human goals and societal values in a way that reliably directs AI behavior. Law-making and legal interpretation form a computational engine that converts opaque human values into legible directives. "Law…
Recent developments in computer science and artificial intelligence have also contributed to the legal domain, as revealed by the number and range of related publications and applications. Machine and deep learning models require…
In the same sense as classical logic is a formal theory of truth, the recently initiated approach called computability logic is a formal theory of computability. It understands (interactive) computational problems as games played by a…
Smart Contracts use computer technology to automate the performance of aspects of commercial agreements. Yet how can there be confidence that the computer code is faithful to the intentions of the parties? To understand the depth and…