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

Abstract

Considerable attention has been given to the accessibility of legal documents, such as legislation and case law, both in legal information retrieval (query formulation, search algorithms), in legal information dissemination practice (numerous examples of on-line access to formal sources of law), and in legal knowledge-based systems (by translating the contents of those documents to readyto-use rule and case-based systems). However, within AI & law, it has hardly ever been tried to make the contents of sources of law, and the relations among them, more accessible to those without a legal education. This article presents a theory about translating sources of law into information accessible to persons without a legal education. It illustrates the theory by providing two elaborated examples of such translation ventures. In the first example, formal sources of law in the domain of exchanging police information are translated into rules of thumb useful for policemen. In the second example, the goal of providing non-legal professionals with insight into legislative procedures is translated into a framework for making available sources of law through an integrated legislative calendar. Although the theory itself does not support automating the several stages described, in this article some hints are given as to what such automation would have to look like.

Legal Concepts and Multilingual Contexts in Digital Information

“…Let us consider the creative power of the legislator in creating new legal entities: legislative definitions have a constitutive force, so we can assume that, for any new definition, a new concept is added in the legal system. Definitions affect lexical meaning of terms in different ways: delimiting, extending and narrowing [3]. Delimiting definitions refer to lexical meaning, but they remove some of the vagueness, for instance in Directive 2008/ 104, Art.3 "worker: any person who, in the Member State concerned, is protected as an employee under national employment law and in accordance with national practice".…”

Assessing the Readability of Policy Documents on the Digital Single Market of the European Union

“…In practice, collaboration between layers and engineers is often required for such translations [7]. To ease the translations, different formalization methods and tools have long been proposed [8]. Eventually, such solutions may eliminate the need to have lawyers in situations requiring the engineering of requirements originating from law.…”

Adopting robot lawyer? The extending artificial intelligence robot lawyer technology acceptance model for legal industry by an exploratory study

“…However, the legal AI also has a certain practical dilemma (Mommers, Voermans, Koelewijn, & Kielman, 2009), which contains incomplete, untrue and nonobjective date, shortage of structuralization and fuzzy, opaque and inefficient algorithm (Riesen & Serpen, 2008;Mcnamar, 2009;Hashem, Yaqoob, Anuar, Mokhtar, Gani, & Khan, 2015;Hildebrandt, 2018), which can easily lead to new conflicts such as implicit discrimination (Moses & Chan, 2014). AI is more likely to automate legal customer service in general, but high-level interaction, such as negotiation, makes it difficult to replace human (Bryson & Winfield, 2017), because AI has limited cognitive range, and the computational patterns and logic is relatively fixed (Prakken, 2005), which results in its incompetence in judicial work with large knowledge coverage and high technical content (Deedman & Smith, 1991;Zeleznikow, 2002).…”