Program Transparency for Legal Machines

Abstract

This paper attempts to define the transparency problem. The context is the changeover from a text culture to a machine culture in law. The paradigm change to electronic procedures reveals new contexts for justice. Note that equal access to e-procedures does not guarantee justice. The transparency of the law leads to the transparency of programs. We formulate two requirements for legal machines: 1) the architecture of the program must be made accessible; and 2) the program must provide legal protection. The implementation of these requirements is a subject for software engineering. A need therefore arises for the requirements to flow down to lower level specifications. In the end we define program transparency as a compliance problem.

Data modeling and NLP-based scoring method to assess the relevance of environmental regulatory announcements

“…The task of obtaining this knowledge through a corresponding investigation bears some similarities to what lawyers refer to as 'legal characterization' or 'legal subsumption.' A description of the theoretical foundation of the notion of subsumption, for example, is available in (Cyras and Lachmayer, 2014).…”

“…The research described in this article aims to investigate IT-based assistance for announcement monitoring and relevance assessments and to pioneer and test respective assistance tools. We do not target what is in legal informatics often referred to as 'legal machines' (Cyras and Lachmayer 2014), but our approach bears some commonalities to these works, particularly regarding the aspect of legal subsumption.…”