A modernizing nation’s economic prosperity requires at least a modest legal infrastructure centered on the protection of property and contract rights. The essential legal reform required to create that infrastructure may be the adoption of a system of relatively precise legal rules, as distinct from more open-ended standards or a heavy investment in upgrading the nation’s judiciary. A virtuous ...

Accessing legal regulations and legislation on the web should be improved by semantic annotation of legal rules. However, producing this type of annotations is challenging because legal language is difficult to parse automatically and any annotation involves a part of interpretation. We argue that an extended controlled language must be defined to address that issue. We present aspects of a con...

Although the concept of soft law has existed for years, scholars have not reached consensus on why states use soft law or even whether “soft law” is a coherent analytic category. In part, this confusion reflects a deep diversity in both the types of international agreements and the strategic situations that produce them. In this paper, we advance four complementary explanations for why states u...

We compare the bargaining power of the patentee under American and English rules of legal costs allocation. Using the Nash Bargaining Game framework, we show that litigation can be a Pareto efficient outcome. The cooperative game framework allows us to examine how the institutional and market factors influence bargaining powers of plaintiff and defendant under different rules of legal cost allo...

When agents need to make decisions on multiple issues, one solution is to vote on the issues sequentially. In this paper, we investigate how well the winner under the sequential voting process approximates the winners under some common voting rules. Some common voting rules, including Borda, k-approval, Copeland, maximin, Bucklin, and Dodgson, admit natural scoring functions that can serve as a...

In most attempts to model legal systems as formal argumentation systems, legal norms are viewed as an argumentation’s system inference rules. Since in formal argumentation systems inference rules are generally assumed to be fixed and independent from the inferences they enable, this approach fails to capture the dialectical connection between norms and arguments, where on the one hand legal arg...

We develop an informational model of judicial decision-making in which deference to precedent is useful to policy-oriented appellate judges because it improves the accuracy with which they can communicate legal rules to trial judges. Our simple model yields new implications and hypotheses regarding conditions under which judges will maintain or break with precedent, the constraining effect that...

The automatic detection of definitions in legal texts has mainly been considered from the perspective of legal information retrieval so far. In this paper, we demonstrate that the same techniques can also be employed for the purpose of a domain-specific automated style checking of draft laws. We report on the automatic identification of legal definitions in a large corpus of Swiss laws, and we ...

The specific characteristics of genetic data lead to ethical-legal conflicts in the framework of genetic diagnosis. Several international organisations, including UNESCO and the Council of Europe, have enacted rules referring to the use of genetic information. This paper discusses possible legal and ethical criteria that could be used in genetic testing.

After a long and productive life, Herbert Hart died on December 19, 1992, at the age of 84. Two years later a second edition of his most influential work, The Concept of Law, appeared with his long awaited "Postscript", posthumously edited by Penelope Bullock and Joseph Raz. Tliis issue of the Newsletter on Philosophy and Law is devoted to a review of some of Hart's major contributions, focusin...