New technologies have always challenged the social, economic, legal, and ideological status quo. Constitutional law is no less impacted by such technologically driven transformations, as the state must formulate a legal response to new technologies and their market applications, as well as the state's own use of new technology. In particular, the development of data collection, data mining, and algorithmic analysis by public and private actors present unique challenges to public law at the doctrinal as well as the theoretical level. This collection, aimed at legal scholars and practitioners, describes the constitutional challenges created by the algorithmic society. It offers an important synthesis of the state of play in law and technology studies, addressing the challenges for fundamental rights and democracy, the role of policy and regulation, and the responsibilities of private actors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Statutory interpretation involves the reconstruction of the meaning of a legal statement when it cannot be considered as accepted or granted. This phenomenon needs to be considered not only from the legal and linguistic perspective, but also from the argumentative one - which focuses on the strategies for defending a controversial or doubtful viewpoint. This book draws upon linguistics, legal theory, computing, and dialectics to present an argumentation-based approach to statutory interpretation. By translating and summarizing the existing legal interpretative canons into eleven patterns of natural arguments - called argumentation schemes - the authors offer a system of argumentation strategies for developing, defending, assessing, and attacking an interpretation. Illustrated through major cases from both common and civil law, this methodology is summarized in diagrams and maps for application to computer sciences. These visuals help make the structures, strategies, and vulnerabilities of legal reasoning accessible to both legal professionals and laypeople.

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.

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.

This volume presents two Leibnizian writings, the Specimen of Philosophical Questions Collected from the Law and the Dissertation on Perplexing Cases. These works, originally published in 1664 and 1666, constitute, respectively, Leibniz's thesis for the title of Master of Philosophy and his doctoral dissertation in law. Besides providing evidence of the earliest development of Leibniz's thought and amazing anticipations of his mature views, they present a genuine intellectual interest, for the freshness and originality of Leibniz's reflections on a striking variety of logico-philosophical puzzles drawn from the law. The Specimen addresses puzzling issues resulting from apparent conflicts between law and philosophy (the latter broadly understood as comprising also mathematics, as well as empirical sciences). The Dissertation addresses cases whose solution is puzzling because of the convoluted logical form of legal dispositions and contractual clauses, or because of conflicting priorities between concurring parties. In each case, Leibniz dissects the problems with the greatest ingenuity, disentangling their different aspects, and proposing solutions always reasonable and sometimes surprising. And he does not refrain from peppering his intellectual acrobatics with some humorous comments.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the two International Workshops on Artificial Intelligence Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, AICOL IV and AICOL V, held in 2013. The first took place as part of the 26th IVR Congress in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, during July 21-27, 2013; the second was held in Bologna as a joint special workshop of JURIX 2013 on December 11, 2013. The 19 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. They are organized in topical sections named: social intelligence and legal conceptual models; legal theory, normative systems and software agents; semantic Web technologies, legal ontologies and argumentation; and crowdsourcing and online dispute resolution (ODR).

This volume presents two Leibnizian writings, the "Specimen of Philosophical Questions Collected from the Law" and the "Dissertation on Perplexing Cases. "These works," "originally published in 1664 and 1666, constitute, respectively, Leibniz s thesis for the title of Master of Philosophy and his doctoral dissertation in law. Besides providing evidence of the earliest development of Leibniz s thought and amazing anticipations of his mature views, they present a genuine intellectual interest, for the freshness and originality of Leibniz s reflections on a striking variety of logico-philosophical puzzles drawn from the law. The "Specimen" addresses puzzling issues resulting from apparent conflicts between law and philosophy (the latter broadly understood as comprising also mathematics, as well as empirical sciences). The "Dissertation" addresses cases whose solution is puzzling because of the convoluted logical form of legal dispositions and contractual clauses, or because of conflicting priorities between concurring parties. In each case, Leibniz dissects the problems with the greatest ingenuity, disentangling their different aspects, and proposing solutions always reasonable and sometimes surprising. And he does not refrain from peppering his intellectual acrobatics with some humorous comments.

Approaches to legal ontologies constitutes a collective reflection on the foundations of legal ontology engineering, by exploring current methodologies and theoretical approaches to defining legal ontologies, their divergences and complementarity and the challenges still to be faced. It gathers contributions from leading experts regarding their theoretical commitments and methodological approaches derived from a long experience in the area and presents a mature reflection on achievements and current shortcomings. The various authors reconstruct their concrete methodological frameworks by retrieving the more or less explicit theoretical choices that have guided their work on legal ontology engineering over the last years. This results in the presentation of apparently opposed but in fact complementary rationales for ontology building in the legal domain (legal-theoretical, sociolegal, philosophical, among others) that address the various dimensions of legal knowledge and its conceptual modelling. The book provides the reader with a unique source regarding the current theoretical landscape in legal ontology engineering as well as on foreseeable future trends for the definition of conceptual structures to enhance the automatic processing and retrieval of legal information in the Semantic Web framework. It will thus interest researchers in the domains of the SW, legal informatics, Artificial Intelligence and law, legal theory and legal philosophy, as well as developers of e-government applications based on the intelligent management of legal or public information to provide both back-office and front-office support.

The inspiring idea of this workshop series, Artificial Intelligence Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems (AICOL), is to develop models of legal knowledge concerning organization, structure, and content in order to promote mutual understanding and communication between different systems and cultures. Complexity and complex systems describe recent developments in AI and law, legal theory, argumentation, the Semantic Web, and multi-agent systems. Multisystem and multilingual ontologies provide an important opportunity to integrate different trends of research in AI and law, including comparative legal studies. Complexity theory, graph theory, game theory, and any other contributions from the mathematical disciplines can help both to formalize the dynamics of legal systems and to capture relations among norms. Cognitive science can help the modeling of legal ontology by taking into account not only the formal features of law but also social behaviour, psychology, and cultural factors. This book is thus meant to support scholars in different areas of science in sharing knowledge and methodological approaches. This volume collects the contributions to the workshop's third edition, which took place as part of the 25th IVR congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, held in Frankfurt, Germany, in August 2011. This volume comprises six main parts devoted to the each of the six topics addressed in the workshop, namely: models for the legal system ethics and the regulation of ICT, legal knowledge management, legal information for open access, software agent systems in the legal domain, as well as legal language and legal ontology.

In the study of forms of legal reasoning, logic and argumentation theory long followed separate tracks. Legal logicians' tended to focus on a deductive reconstruction of justifying a decision, disregarding the dialectical process leading to the chosen justification. Others instead emphasized the adversarial and discretionary nature of legal reasoning, involving reasonable evaluation of alternative choices, and the use of analogical reasoning. Recently, however, developments in Artificial Intelligence and Law have paved the way for overcoming this separation. Logic has widened its scope to defensible argumentation, and informal accounts of analogy and dialectics have inspired the construction of computer programs. Thus the prospect is emerging of an integrated logical and dialectical account of legal argument, adding to the understanding of legal reasoning, and providing a formal basis for computer tools that assist and mediate legal debates while leaving room for human initiative. This book presents contributions to this development. From a logical point of view it covers topics such as evaluating conflicting arguments, weighing reasons, modelling legal disputes as a dialogue game, the role of the burden of proof, the relation between principles, rules, reasons and facts, and the relation between deductive and nondeductive arguments. Written by leading scholars in the field and building on recent developments in logic and Artificial Intelligence, the chapters provide a state-of-the-art account of research on the logical aspects of legal argument.

Reasonableness is at the centre of legal debate, both in academic circles and in practice. This unique reference work adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, merging jurisprudence, legal theory, political philosophy and the different branches of law. All aspects relating to reasonableness and law are addressed by the most prominent scholars in the field. In the first part of the book, the focus is on jurisprudential analyses of the concept of reasonableness and on its moral, political and constitutional implications. In the second part, reasonableness is examined in the different fields of law like Public, Private and International Law. Here in more detail the practical consequences of reasonableness are worked out, making this work of interest to practitioners as well as legal theorists.

Approaches to legal ontologies constitutes a collective reflection on the foundations of legal ontology engineering, by exploring current methodologies and theoretical approaches to defining legal ontologies, their divergences and complementarity and the challenges still to be faced. It gathers contributions from leading experts regarding their theoretical commitments and methodological approaches derived from a long experience in the area and presents a mature reflection on achievements and current shortcomings. The various authors reconstruct their concrete methodological frameworks by retrieving the more or less explicit theoretical choices that have guided their work on legal ontology engineering over the last years. This results in the presentation of apparently opposed but in fact complementary rationales for ontology building in the legal domain (legal-theoretical, sociolegal, philosophical, among others) that address the various dimensions of legal knowledge and its conceptual modelling. The book provides the reader with a unique source regarding the current theoretical landscape in legal ontology engineering as well as on foreseeable future trends for the definition of conceptual structures to enhance the automatic processing and retrieval of legal information in the Semantic Web framework. It will thus interest researchers in the domains of the SW, legal informatics, Artificial Intelligence and law, legal theory and legal philosophy, as well as developers of e-government applications based on the intelligent management of legal or public information to provide both back-office and front-office support.

The judiciary is in the early stages of a transformation in which AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology will help to make the judicial process faster, cheaper, and more predictable without compromising the integrity of judges' discretionary reasoning. Judicial decision-making is an area of daunting complexity, where highly sophisticated legal expertise merges with cognitive and emotional competence. How can AI contribute to a process that encompasses such a wide range of knowledge, judgment, and experience? Rather than aiming at the impossible dream (or nightmare) of building an automatic judge, AI research has had two more practical goals: producing tools to support judicial activities, including programs for intelligent document assembly, case retrieval, and support for discretionary decision-making; and developing new analytical tools for understanding and modeling the judicial process, such as case-based reasoning and formal models of dialectics, argumentation, and negotiation. Judges, squeezed between tightening budgets and increasing demands for justice, are desperately trying to maintain the quality of their decision-making process while coping with time and resource limitations. Flexible AI tools for decision support may promote uniformity and efficiency in judicial practice, while supporting rational judicial discretion. Similarly, AI may promote flexibility, efficiency and accuracy in other judicial tasks, such as drafting various judicial documents. The contributions in this volume exemplify some of the directions that the AI transformation of the judiciary will take.

Information technology has now pervaded the legal sector, and the very modern concepts of e-law and e-justice show that automation processes are ubiquitous. European policies on transparency and information society, in particular, require the use of technology and its steady improvement.

Some of the revised papers presented in this book originate from a workshop held at the European University Institute of Florence, Italy, in December 2006. The workshop was devoted to the discussion of the different ways of understanding and explaining contemporary law, for the purpose of building computable models of it -- especially models enabling the development of computer applications for the legal domain. During the course of the following year, several new contributions, provided by a number of ongoing (or recently finished) European projects on computation and law, were received, discussed and reviewed to complete the survey.

This book presents 20 thoroughly refereed revised papers on the hot topics under research in different EU projects: legislative XML, legal ontologies, semantic web, search and meta-search engines, web services, system architecture, dialectic systems, dialogue games, multi-agent systems (MAS), legal argumentation, legal reasoning, e-justice, and online dispute resolution. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation, ontologies and XML legislative drafting; knowledge representation, legal ontologies and information retrieval; argumentation and legal reasoning; normative and multi-agent systems; and online dispute resolution.

The judiciary is in the early stages of a transformation in which AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology will help to make the judicial process faster, cheaper, and more predictable without compromising the integrity of judges' discretionary reasoning. Judicial decision-making is an area of daunting complexity, where highly sophisticated legal expertise merges with cognitive and emotional competence. How can AI contribute to a process that encompasses such a wide range of knowledge, judgment, and experience? Rather than aiming at the impossible dream (or nightmare) of building an automatic judge, AI research has had two more practical goals: producing tools to support judicial activities, including programs for intelligent document assembly, case retrieval, and support for discretionary decision-making; and developing new analytical tools for understanding and modeling the judicial process, such as case-based reasoning and formal models of dialectics, argumentation, and negotiation. Judges, squeezed between tightening budgets and increasing demands for justice, are desperately trying to maintain the quality of their decision-making process while coping with time and resource limitations. Flexible AI tools for decision support may promote uniformity and efficiency in judicial practice, while supporting rational judicial discretion. Similarly, AI may promote flexibility, efficiency and accuracy in other judicial tasks, such as drafting various judicial documents. The contributions in this volume exemplify some of the directions that the AI transformation of the judiciary will take.

In the study of forms of legal reasoning, logic and argumentation theory long followed separate tracks. Legal logicians' tended to focus on a deductive reconstruction of justifying a decision, disregarding the dialectical process leading to the chosen justification. Others instead emphasized the adversarial and discretionary nature of legal reasoning, involving reasonable evaluation of alternative choices, and the use of analogical reasoning. Recently, however, developments in Artificial Intelligence and Law have paved the way for overcoming this separation. Logic has widened its scope to defensible argumentation, and informal accounts of analogy and dialectics have inspired the construction of computer programs. Thus the prospect is emerging of an integrated logical and dialectical account of legal argument, adding to the understanding of legal reasoning, and providing a formal basis for computer tools that assist and mediate legal debates while leaving room for human initiative. This book presents contributions to this development. From a logical point of view it covers topics such as evaluating conflicting arguments, weighing reasons, modelling legal disputes as a dialogue game, the role of the burden of proof, the relation between principles, rules, reasons and facts, and the relation between deductive and nondeductive arguments. Written by leading scholars in the field and building on recent developments in logic and Artificial Intelligence, the chapters provide a state-of-the-art account of research on the logical aspects of legal argument.

This book includes revised selected papers from the International Workshops on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, AICOL-XI@JURIX2018, held in Groningen, The Netherlands, on December 12, 2018; AICOL-XII@JURIX 2020, held in Brno, Czechia, on December 9, 2020; XAILA@JURIX 2020, held in in Brno, Czechia, on December 9, 2020.*The 17 full and 4 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected form 39 submissions. They represent a comprehensive picture of the state of the art in legal informatics. The papers are logically organized in 5 blocks: Knowledge Representation; Logic, rules, and reasoning; Explainable AI in Law and Ethics; Law as Web of linked Data and the Rule of Law; Data protection and Privacy Modelling and Reasoning. *Due to the Covid-19 pandemic AICOL-XII@JURIX 2020 and XAILA@JURIX 2020 were held virtually.

This book includes revised selected papers from five International Workshops on Artificial Intelligence Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, AICOL VI to AICOL X, held during 2015-2017: AICOL VI in Braga, Portugal, in December 2015 as part of JURIX 2015; AICOL VII at EKAW 2016 in Bologna, Italy, in November 2016; AICOL VIII in Sophia Antipolis, France, in December 2016; AICOL IX at ICAIL 2017 in London, UK, in June 2017; and AICOL X as part of JURIX 2017 in Luxembourg, in December 2017. The 37 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected form 69 submissions. They represent a comprehensive picture of the state of the art in legal informatics. The papers are organized in six main sections: legal philosophy, conceptual analysis, and epistemic approaches; rules and norms analysis and representation;legal vocabularies and natural language processing; legal ontologies and semantic annotation; legal argumentation; and courts, adjudication and dispute resolution.

Reasonableness is at the centre of legal debate, both in academic circles and in practice. This unique reference work adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, merging jurisprudence, legal theory, political philosophy and the different branches of law. All aspects relating to reasonableness and law are addressed by the most prominent scholars in the field. In the first part of the book, the focus is on jurisprudential analyses of the concept of reasonableness and on its moral, political and constitutional implications. In the second part, reasonableness is examined in the different fields of law like Public, Private and International Law. Here in more detail the practical consequences of reasonableness are worked out, making this work of interest to practitioners as well as legal theorists.

Statutory interpretation involves the reconstruction of the meaning of a legal statement when it cannot be considered as accepted or granted. This phenomenon needs to be considered not only from the legal and linguistic perspective, but also from the argumentative one - which focuses on the strategies for defending a controversial or doubtful viewpoint. This book draws upon linguistics, legal theory, computing, and dialectics to present an argumentation-based approach to statutory interpretation. By translating and summarizing the existing legal interpretative canons into eleven patterns of natural arguments - called argumentation schemes - the authors offer a system of argumentation strategies for developing, defending, assessing, and attacking an interpretation. Illustrated through major cases from both common and civil law, this methodology is summarized in diagrams and maps for application to computer sciences. These visuals help make the structures, strategies, and vulnerabilities of legal reasoning accessible to both legal professionals and laypeople.