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In this article we describe two core ontologies of law that specify knowledge that is common to all domains of law. The first one, FOLaw describes and explains dependencies between types of knowledge in legal reasoning; the second one, LRI-Core ontology, captures the main concepts in legal information processing. Although FOLaw has shown to be of high practical value in various applied European ICT projects, its reuse is rather limited as it is rather concerned with the structure of legal reasoning than with legal knowledge itself: as many other ''legal core ontologies'', FOLaw is therefore rather an epistemological framework than an ontology. Therefore, we also developed LRI-Core. As we argue here that legal knowledge is based to a large extend on common-sense knowledge, LRI-Core is particularly inspired by research on abstract commonsense concepts. The main categories of LRI-Core are: physical, mental and abstract concepts. Roles cover in particular social worlds. Another special category are occurrences; terms that denote events and situations. We illustrate the use of LRI-Core with an ontology for Dutch criminal law, developed in the e-Court European project.

In the last decades the interest in the problem of comparing and harmonizing legislation has been steadily increasing. One reason is the increasing legal convergence between governments in the European Union, and the increasing traffic of people over borders of jurisdictions. Another reason is the increasing globalization of companies; Products and services are offered in many jurisdictions at the same time, and the product or service has to meet the provisions of all jurisdictions in which it is offered. In the E-POWER project relevant tax legislation and business processes are modeled in UML to improve the speed and efficiency with which the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration can implement decision support systems for internal use and for its clients. These conceptual models have also proven their usefulness for efficient and effective analysis of draft legislation. We are currently researching whether conceptual modeling can also be used to compare 'similar' legislation from different jurisdictions to improve the capacity of the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration to react to future consequences of increased movement of people, products, and money between EU member states and increased harmonization between tax authorities in Europe. In addition, addressing the problem of comparing models is also expected to improve our methodology for modeling legislation. This paper discusses problems and requirements of comparing legislation as we understand them now, and attempts to relate them to relevant research.

More and more legal information is available in electronic form, but traditional retrieval mechanisms are insufficient to answer questions and legal problems of most users. In the ESPRIT project CLIME we are building a "Legal Information Server" (LIS), that not only retrieves all relevant norms for a user's query, but also applies them, giving the normative consequences of the 'situation' presented in the query. Typically, these queries represent very general and underspecilied cases. Underspecification may lead to 'overlooking' of relevant norms, in particular those norms that directly change the legal status of a case: exceptions. Most exceptions in legislation however, are implicit, i.e. will only be detected afrer trying all norms for a particular case and resolving conflicts between applicable norms. For LISs we suggest to make the exception relations between norms explicit in off-line mode, so that we can use these exception structures to warn users about potential exceptions to their queries.