Finanziamento UE – NextGenerationEU PRIN 2022 "Smart Legal Order in DigiTal Society - SLOTS" PNRR M4C2 investimento 1.1 Avviso 104/2022

In the last two decades the legal informatics community elaborated relevant outcomes in order to manage the Law and legislation in machine-readable format using Semantic Web (Casanovas 2016), Open Government Data (Casanovas 2017, Francesconi 2018), Free Access to Law Movements (Greenleaf 2011) or LegalXML community (Akoma Ntoso, AKN4UN, KN4EU,LegalRuleML,ELI/ECLI). Additionally, the AI and Law community provided a widespread literature about legal reasoning, machine learning and Legal Analytics, and tools for extracting legal knowledge from texts and predictive models (Ashley 2017). Finally, the legal design (Hagan 2020) has proposed new patterns for smart visualization of the legal content abiding by the principles of legal theory. Despite the success, in 2018 New Zealand Government started a project named “Rules as Code” (RaC) and in 2020 it proposed to OECD-OPSI to codify a new approach: the idea is to use coding methodology to create a macro-framework of law, which is legally binding and produces legal text in natural language. The idea to produce law algorithmically (consumable-law) is fascinating and it can reduce trivial errors, unclear norms, wrong normative citations, inconsistency between definitions, simplify the legalese language in legislation, but there is also the risk to reduce the legal language to a pure syntactical serialization, crystallizing any interpretation and so to compress the legislation and the execution in one single step. But the main weakness of RaC is its inability to integrate in a single framework legal theory, interpretation theory, legal linguistics theory, semiotic theory principles as well as the last 30 years of results in AI&law academic community (Bench-Capon 2012; Verheij 2020). SLOTS wants to take the challenge of coding of the law (also with non-textual forms) to build a solid constitutionally based legal framework supported by philosophy of law theory, legal-informatics and legal language foundations, which makes legally effective the machine-computable Law produced directly by Institutions. The most visible risk is that if not supported by solid theoretical scientific methodology, new e-legal system models based on the coding could be a new black-box not explainable to the common end-user. To tackle such risk, this project aims to frame SLOTS in the key theoretical disciplines of law.. The project thus covers the following fields: i) Constitutional and parliamentary law, with the aim of understanding the reach and the limits in the machine-consumable law; ii) Philosophy of law analysis including the interpretation and epistemic elements, to define the relationship between natural language and algorithmic law; iii) Legal informatics prototypes to represent the norms in defensibility logic and temporal legal reasoning, using also NLP tools for extracting legal knowledge from the text iv) Computer science prototypes to exploit AI, LegalXML, Legal design to support law-making process.