Academic Journal

Encoding legislation: a methodology for enhancing technical validation, legal alignment and interdisciplinarity

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Encoding legislation: a methodology for enhancing technical validation, legal alignment and interdisciplinarity
المؤلفون: Alice Witt, Anna Huggins, Guido Governatori, Joshua Buckley
سنة النشر: 2023
مصطلحات موضوعية: Information and computing sciences, Artificial intelligence, Law and legal studies, Law in context, Private law and civil obligations, Cognitive and computational psychology, Uncategorised value
الوصف: This article proposes an innovative methodology for enhancing the technical validation, legal alignment and interdisciplinarity of attempts to encode legislation. In the context of an experiment that examines how different legally trained participants convert select provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) into machine-executable code, we find that a combination of manual and automated methods for coding validation, which focus on formal adherence to programming languages and conventions, can significantly increase the similarity of encoded rules between coders. Participants nonetheless encountered various interpretive difficulties, including syntactic ambiguity, and intra- and intertextuality, which necessitated legal evaluation, as distinct from and in addition to coding validation. Many of these difficulties can be resolved through what we call a process of ‘legal alignment’ that aims to enhance the congruence between encoded provisions and the true meaning of a statute as determined by the courts. However, some difficulties cannot be overcome in advance, such as factual indeterminacy. Given the inherently interdisciplinary nature of encoding legislation, we argue that it is desirable for ‘rules as code’ (‘RaC’) initiatives to have, at a minimum, legal subject matter, statutory interpretation and technical programming expertise. Overall, we contend that technical validation, legal alignment and interdisciplinary teamwork are integral to the success of attempts to encode legislation. While legal alignment processes will vary depending on jurisdictionally-specific principles and practices of statutory interpretation, the technical and interdisciplinary components of our methodology are transferable across regulatory contexts, bodies of law and Commonwealth and other jurisdictions.
نوع الوثيقة: article in journal/newspaper
اللغة: unknown
Relation: http://hdl.handle.net/10779/DRO/DU:25763028.v1; https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Encoding_legislation_a_methodology_for_enhancing_technical_validation_legal_alignment_and_interdisciplinarity/25763028
الاتاحة: http://hdl.handle.net/10779/DRO/DU:25763028.v1
https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Encoding_legislation_a_methodology_for_enhancing_technical_validation_legal_alignment_and_interdisciplinarity/25763028
Rights: All Rights Reserved
رقم الانضمام: edsbas.61D79B90
قاعدة البيانات: BASE