Motivation

Using symbolic logic to formalise legal norms is one of the most traditional goals of legal informatics as a scientific discipline. More than mere theoretical value, this approach is also connected to promising real-world applications involving, e.g., the observance of legal norms by highly automated machines or even the (partial) automatisation of legal reasoning, leading to new automated legal services.

Albeit the long research tradition on the use of logic to formalise legal norms – be it by using classic logic systems (e.g., first-order logic), be it by attempting to construct a specific system of logic of norms (e.g., deontic logic) –, many challenges involved in the development of an adequate methodology for the formalisation of concrete legal regulations remain unsolved. This includes not only the choice of a sufficiently expressive formal language or model, but also the concrete way through which a legal text formulated in natural language is to be translated into the formal representation.

The workshop LoReTra seeks to explore the various challenges connected with the task of using formal languages and models to represent legal norms, at the example of traffic rules, in a machine-readable manner, and reasoning with such formalizations, e.g., in autonomous driving.

Topics

LoReTra seeks to discuss current research questions concerning (among others):

Knowledge representation methods applicable to legal norms (in particular traffic rules), including different types of (deontic) logic or comparable formalisms
Formalisation of and reasoning with rule-exceptions, rule-conflicts and/or contrary-to-duty obligations
Formalisation of abstract legal concepts and basic principles of law (e.g., "human dignity", "mutual respect", "care", "danger", "trust")
Models and approaches to the practical implementation of law-formalisations (e.g., (legal) ontologies, LegalRuleML, PROLEG, reasoning engines, SAT-solvers)
Models and approaches - including automated methods - to adequately 'translate' legal provisions (especially traffic rules) from natural language to a formal symbolism
Legal and/or engineering challenges arising from the use of formal representation methods to formalise legal norms (especially traffic rules)
Methods and approaches for legal and ethical AI reasoning and compliance checking in autonomous driving applying formalized traffic rules and legal knowledge
Machine learning methods and approaches for knowledge extraction and learning and hybrid symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches for knowledge representation and reasoning with traffic rules

We particularly invite submissionbs including experience reports on concrete attempts at
implementing formalisations of legal norms within an automated system.

Scope

The workshop aims to attract participants from various disciplines, particularly from Computer Science, Law and Philosophy, and to be of interest to anyone working on the application of knowledge representation methods to the field of law.

Participation and Submission

People interested in participating are invited to submit high quality, original short (5-9 pages) or long papers (10-14 pages) in the CEUR-WS.org style template CEURART (1-column variant), available at:

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip

and

https://www.overleaf.com/read/gwhxnqcghhdt.

Submitted papers must be original contributions written in English. Please submit your paper via EasyChair.

Authors of the accepted papers will present at the workshop. The publication of the submited papers (e.g. as CEUR workshop-proceedings) is intended.

Organizers

Georg Borges (Saarland University, Germany)

Adrian Paschke (Freie Universität Berlin and Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany)

Program Committee

Adrian Paschke - Freie Universität Berlin
Ken Satoh - National Institute of Informatics and Sokendai
Alexander Steen - Universität Greifswald
Erich Schweighofer - University of Vienna
Georg Borges - Institute of Legal Informatics, Saarland University
Randy Goebel - University of Alberta
Juliano Maranhao - University of Sao Paulo
Guido Governatori - Independent Researcher

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 17.4.2023 27.4.2023

Notification of acceptance: 16.5.2023

Workshop: 23.6.2023

Sponsor of the Workshop

The LoReTra '23 workshop is part of the project KI Wissen which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.

Call for Papers