Abstract
The linguistic style in which legislation is normally written has many similarities with the language of logic programming. However, examples of legal language taken from the British Nationality Act 1981, the University of Michigan lease termination clause, and the London Underground emergency notice suggest several ways in which the basic model of logic programming could usefully be extended. These extensions include the introduction of types, relative clauses, both ordinary negation and negation by failure, integrity constraints, metalevel reasoning and procedural notation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Allen, L. E., and Saxon, C.S., 1984. ‘Computer Aided Normalizing and Unpacking: Some Interesting Machine-Processable Transformation of Legal Rules’, Computing Power and Legal Reasoning, C. Walter (ed.), West Publishing Company, pp. 495–572.
Bench-Capon, T.J.M., 1987. ‘Support for policy makers: formulating legislation with the aid of logical models’, Proc. of the First International Conference on AI and Law, ACM Press, pp. 181–189.
Bench-Capon, T., 1989. ‘Representing Counterfactual Conditionals’ . Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, A. Cohn (ed.) Pitman Publishing Co.
Bowen, K. A. and Kowalski, R. A., 1982. ‘Amalgamating Language and Metalanguage in Logic Programming’, in Logic Programming, Clark, K.L. and Tamlund, S.-Å., (eds), Academic Press, pp. 153–173.
Bry, F., Decker, H., and Manthey, R., 1988. ‘A uniform approach to constraint satisfaction and constraint satisfiability in deductive databases’, Proceedings of Extending Database Technology. pp. 488–505.
Clark, K. L., 1978. ‘Negation by failure’, in Logic and databases, Gallaire, H. and Minker, J. (eds). Plenum Press, pp. 293–322.
Gallagher, J., 1986. ‘Transforming Logic Programs by Specializing Interpreters’, Proc. of 7th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 109–122.
Gelfond, M. and Lifschitz, V., 1990. ‘Logic programs with classical negation’, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Logic Programming, MIT Press, pp. 579–597.
Gordon, T. F., 1987. ‘Oblog-2 a Hybrid Knowledge Representation System for Defeasible Reasoning’ ; Proc. First International Conference on Artifiicial Intelligence and Law. ACM Press, pp. 231–239.
H.M.S.O., 1981. British Nationality Act 1981, Her Majesty’s Stationery Offiice, London.
Kowalski, R. A. and Sergot, M. J., 1986. ‘A logic-based calculus of events’, New Generation Computing Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 67–95.
Kowalski, R.A., 1989. ‘The treatment of negation in logic programs for representing legislation’, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pp. 11–15.
Kowalski, R.A., 1990. ‘English as a Logic Programming Language’, New Generation Computing, Volume 8, pp. 91–93.
Kowalski, R. A. and Sadri, F., 1990. ‘Logic programs with exceptions’, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Logic Programming, MIT Press, pp. 598–613.
Kowalski, R. A., Sergot, M. J., 1990. ‘The use of logical models in legal problem solving’, Ratio Juris, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 201–218.
Lloyd, J. W. and Topor, R. W., 1984. ‘Making Prolog more expressive’, Journal of Logic Programming Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 225–240.
Lloyd, J. W. and Topor, R. W. 1985. ‘A Basis for Deductive Database Systems’, J. Logic Programming, Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 93–109.
Mitchell, T. M., Keller, R. M. and Kedar-Cabelli, S., 1986. ‘Explanation-based Generalization: A Unifying View’ Machine Learning, Volume 1, pp. 47–80.
Newell, A. and Simon, H. A., 1972 Human problem solving, Prentice-Hall.
Nitta, K., Nagao, J., and Mizutori, T., 1988. ‘Knowledge Representation and Inference System for Procedural Law’, New Generation Computing. pp. 319–359.
Reiter, R., 1990. ‘On asking what a database knows’, Proc. Symposium on Computational Logic, Springer-Verlag.
Sadri, F. and Kowalski, R. A., 1987. ‘A theorem proving approach to database integrity’, in Foundations of deductive databases and logic programming, J. Minker, (ed.), Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 313–362.
Schank, R. C., 1983. ‘The current state of AI: One man’s opinion’, AI Magazine, Volume 4, No. 1, pp. 1–8.
Sergot, M. J., Sadri, F., Kowalski, R. A., Kriwaczek, F., Hammond, P. and Cory, H. T., 1986. ‘The British Nationality Act as a logic program’, CACM, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. 370–386.
Sripada, S. M., 1991. ‘Temporal Reasoning in Deductive Databases’. Department of Computing, Imperial College, London.
Takeuchi, A. and Furukawa, K., 1986. ‘Partial evaluation of PROLOG programs and its application to metaprogramming’, Proc. of IFIP 86, North-Holland, pp. 415–420.
Waterman, D. A. and Hayes-Roth, B., 1978. Pattern-directed Inference Systems, Academic Press, New York.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kowalski, R.A. (1995). Legislation as Logic Programs. In: Bankowski, Z., White, I., Hahn, U. (eds) Informatics and the Foundations of Legal Reasoning. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8531-6_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8531-6_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4542-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8531-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive