Tools for automated legislative

We describe a method for automated codiication of regulations that is being developed at the University of Amsterdam. The method is based on the distinction between normative knowledge and world knowledge (cf. (Breuker & den Haan 1991)). The world knowledge is used to generate all possible situations, which are in turn divided over a subset of legal situations and illegal situations. This bipartite set is called a qualiication model (cf. (den Haan & Winkels 1994)). The situations are transformed into norma-tive rules by using inductive logic programming techniques (cf. (Michalski & Kodratoo 1990)). The algorithms can be tailored to generate legislative drafts that satisfy desired properties through four parameters (cf. (Winkels & den Haan 1995)): the norma-tive default (prescriptive/prohibitive), deontic default (strictly O,F, or P, or indiierent), the level of abstraction (scaling from high to low using largely general rules, or speciic rules), and the viewpoint of the regulation (a speciic norm subject). The last section shows a small example of automated rule generation. Legislative drafting is the process in which new laws are conceived by the government or other legislative bodies, carefully built up in terms of (normative) goals, and subsequently codiied as law texts. 1 Drafting regulations may vary from drafting a contract, a simple regulation for the local library, to legislative drafting under the responsibility of a particular Ministry. In particular for the latter version of this task, the stakes are high, and (semi) automated tools may be welcomed. However, legislative drafting is a complex and empirically not well studied task. 2 Moreover, methodological support is almost absent. 1 Legislative theory on drafting procedures describes general requirements to the drafting process and the composition of new regulations (Waaldijk 1985); (Thornton 1987); (van der Vlies 1991). 2 Other terms are: design or modelling tasks, see for instance (Breuker & van de Velde 1994). Intelligent editors and browsers There are a few operative systems that ooer automated support for legislative drafting. The systems that support information retrieval and editing tools are systems that provide textual support for drafting new legislation, for instance the LEDA system (Voer-mans 1995). Textual support for legislative drafting can be ooered by relatively simple systems (databases, hypertext systems, ooce systems), and concerns information retrieval of relevant texts or electronic communication between drafters. Other legal knowledge-based systems ooer consistency checking of regulations Although textual support provides legislative drafters with intelligent editors that embed the legislative format, …