Generating exception structures for legal information serving

Abstract

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.

On the Ontological Status of Plans and Norms

“…More recently, ontologies have been adopted as a means to give structure to the legal domain, beyond the basic deontic primitives. Ontologies have been used in a wide range of applications, from legal advice [see the application of the CLIME ontology to Maritime Law (Winkels et al 1999;Boer et al 2001), the representation of cadastral data and norms ruling the Real Property Transactions (Stuckenschmidt et al 2001) and the reasoning about the eligibility to legal aid for the indigent (Zeleznikow and Stranieri 2001)], to the access to legal information (Winkels et al 2000;Tiscornia 2001). Various studies aimed at proposing ontological primitives (Mommers, 2001) or at comparing and evaluating different approaches to legal ontologies (Visser and Bench-Capon 1998;Bench-Capon 2001).…”

Understanding the law: improving legal knowledge dissemination by translating the contents of formal sources of law

“…Especially the latter two could be subject to fruitful application of AI & law techniques. As to establishing exceptions to rules, modeling rule sets enables generating exceptions automatically (Winkels et al 1999). Deriving general rules from case law will take advantage from case-based techniques in assessing the relevant differences and similarities among cases-although it should be noted that the legal system in the example above is a civil law system.…”

On the Ontological Status of Norms

“…More recently, ontologies have been adopted as a means to shape the legal domain, beyond the basic deontic primitives. Ontologies have been used in a wide range of applications, from legal advice (see the application of the CLIME ontology to Maritime Law [6,30], the representation of cadastral data and norms ruling the Real Property Transactions [23] and to the access to legal information ( [24,31]). Various studies aimed at proposing ontological primitives [20] or at comparing and evaluating different approaches to legal ontologies [3,26].…”