Dung and Sartor on The Modular Logic of Private International Law

Professor Dr. Phan Minh Dung of the Asian Institute of Technology Department of Computer Science, and Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID, have published The Modular Logic of Private International Law, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

We provide a logical analysis of private international law, a rather esoteric, but increasingly important, domain of the law. Private international law addresses overlaps and conflicts between legal systems by distributing cases between the authorities of such systems (jurisdiction) and establishing what rules these authorities have to apply to each case (choice of law). A formal model of the resulting interactions between legal systems is proposed based on modular argumentation. It is argued that this model may also be useful for governing the interactions between heterogeneous agents, belonging to different and differently regulated virtual societies, without recourse to a central regulatory agency. The model also provides for multiple interpretations concerning rules of private international law as well as substantive rules of the different legal systems.

JURIX 2010 Slides Available

Slides are now available for many papers given at JURIX 2010: The 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, held 16-17 December 2010 at the University of Liverpool Computer Science Department, in Liverpool, England, UK.

HT JURIX Blog.

JURIX 2010

The final program has been posted for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 15-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix.

Click here for papers from the 15 December workshop: Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules 2010.

Click here for information about the invited speakers, who include John L. Sheridan of The National Archives (UK).

Click here for information for conference participants.

We wish our colleagues who are organizing, presenting at, or attending JURIX 2010 a very successful and rewarding conference.

JURIX 2010: Accepted Papers

Accepted papers have been announced for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 16-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

Invited speakers for the conference have also been announced.

Haeusler et al. on Using Intuitionistic Logic as a Basis for Legal Ontologies

Professor Dr. Edward Hermann Haeusler of Pontifícia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) Departamento de Informática, Dr. Valeria de Paiva of Cuil, Inc., and Dr. Alexandre Rademaker of Escola de Pós-Graduação em Economia (EPGE) – Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), have published Using Intuitionistic Logic as a Basis for Legal Ontologies, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 69-76 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

Classical Description Logic has been widely used as a basis for ontology creation and reasoning in many knowledge specific domains. These specific domains naturally include Legal AI. As in any other domain, consistency is an important issue for legal ontologies. However, due to its inherently normative feature, coherence (consistency) in legal ontologies is more subtle than in most other domains. Negation and subsumption play a central role in ontology coherence. An adequate intuitionistic semantics for negation in a legal domain comes to the fore when we take legally valid individual statements as the inhabitants of our legal ontology. This allows us to elegantly deal with particular situations of legal coherence, such as conflict of laws, as those solved by Private International Law analysis. This paper: (1) Briefly presents our version of Intuitionistic Description Logic, called IALC for Intuitionistic ALC (ALC being the canonical classical description logic system) (2) Discusses the jurisprudence foundation of our system, and (3) Shows how we can perform a coherence analysis of “Conflict of Laws in Space” by means of IALC. This paper reports work-in-progress on using this alternative definition of logical negation for building and testing legal ontologies and reasoning in AI.