Visualization of Legal Informatics

This paper explores the subject matter of legal informatics. The life-long work of the first author concerning the visualization and coding of statutes is generalized. Besides positive law and customary law, the emergence of machine law is a current topic of focus in the literature. In machine law, legal acts are posited by machines and not by humans (primarily in a situational context). The transformation of a legal act to a legal document can happen in two ways. First, it is a transformation of the legal act into explicit punctuation, for example, for announcement in the case of laws or for written execution in the case of judgments, and, second, as a trend towards electronic documents. Legal theory forms a meta-level to the law and similarly legal informatics forms a meta-level to legal information. Legal informatics in Austria is based on the work of Ota Weinberger, Ilmar Tammelo and Leo Reisinger and has been developed by Erich Schweighofer in the framework of the IRIS conferences. Legal informatics is distinguished from legal information, whereas legal logic and meta-theories appear on top of legal informatics. In terms of syntax, machine culture is characterized by formal notations. Notations of legal logic are just the beginning; the target is a technical notation, a basis for programming. Visualizations are in the middle. On the one hand, visualizations serve to understand people by breaking away from the textual; on the other hand, by emphasizing the formal they form a bridge to machines. Legal text can be translated directly into formal languages, but visualizations can facilitate this task as an intermediate methodological step. Hans-Georg Fill’s metamodeling can be seen as a metameta-level.

Diversification of Legislation Editing Open Software (LEOS) Using Software Agents—Transforming Parliamentary Control of the Hellenic Parliament into Big Open Legal Data

The accessibility and reuse of legal data is paramount for promoting transparency, accountability and, ultimately, trust towards governance institutions. The aggregation of structured and semi-structured legal data inevitably leads to the big data realm and a series of challenges for the generation, handling, and analysis of large datasets. When it comes to data generation, LEOS represents a legal informatics tool that is maturing quickly. Now in its third release, it effectively supports the drafting of legal documents using Akoma Ntoso compatible schemes. However, the tool, originally developed for cooperative legislative drafting, can be repurposed to draft parliamentary control documents. This is achieved through the use of actor-oriented software components, referred to as software agents, which enable system interoperability by interlinking the text editing system with parliamentary control datasets. A validated corpus of written questions from the Hellenic Parliament is used to evaluate the feasibility of the endeavour, and the feasibility of using it as an authoring tool for written parliamentary questions and generation of standardised, open, legislative data. Systemic integration not only proves the tool’s versatility, but also opens up new grounds in interoperability between formerly unrelated legal systems and data sources.

Elevating Legal Informatics in the Digital Age

The widespread use of digital technologies within society incorporating elements of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing at a phenomenal rate. This technology promises a multitude of advantages for the development of society. However, it also entails risks. A characteristic of AI technology is that, in addition to using knowledge from computer science, it is increasingly being combined with insights from within the cognitive sciences. This deeper insight into human behavior combined with technology increases the ability of those who control the technology to not only predict but also manipulate human behavior. A function of the law is to protect individuals and society from risks and vulnerabilities, including those associated with technology. The more complex the technologies applied in society, the more difficult it may be to identify the potential harms associated with the technologies. Consequently, it is worthwhile discussing the extent to which the law protects society from the risks associated with technology. In applying the law, the dominant method is the “traditional legal science method.” It incorporates a dogmatic approach and can be described as the default legal problem-solving mechanism utilized by legal students and practitioners. A question that arises is whether it is equipped to meet the new demands placed on law in an increasingly technocratic society. Attempting to frame the modern risks to society using a traditional legal science method alone is bound to provide an unsatisfactory result in that it fails to provide a complete picture of the problem. Simply put, modern societal problems that arise from the use of new digital technologies are multidimensional in nature and require a multidisciplinary solution. In other words, applying a restrictive legal approach may result in solutions that are logical from a purely legal perspective but that are out of step with reality, potentially resulting in unjust solutions. This chapter examines the increased digitalization of society from the legal perspective and also elevates the application of the legal informatics approach as a means of better aligning research within in legal science with other disciplines.

Le risorse documentarie dell’Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica del CNR per un’analisi di termini giuridici rilevanti: il caso di studio della parola «razza»

Part of public opinion believes that Article 3 of the Italian Constitution should be reformulated by eliminating the word "race", because of its historical meanings. Some jurists disagree with this opinion believing that this presence is still justified by the need to fight possible discrimination or to protect minority rights. Biologists have also entered the debate, asserting that this word cannot be used to refer to human races because there’s no scientific basis for race. Cleared up any doubt about the origin of the term and the use that should be made of it, to contribute to today's debate, we have verified how this term was used in the language of law, using the terminological resources of the Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems (IGSG) – CNR databases.