Prof. ROTOLO and Prof. SCHICHL – Law and Logic – Current research trends, applications and perspectives from a legal philosopher’s and a mathematician’s view

In a first part, research trends in legal logic from the viewpoint of legal philosophy and artificial intelligence and law will be outlined. In particular, the following perspectives and challenges will be considered:

(a) developing innovative logics and argumentation frameworks for modelling and representing legal interpretation and interpretive canons;
(b) devising adequate and comprehensive logical models for understanding and reconstructing norm change mechanisms and legal dynamics;
(c) studying the game-theoretic nature of argumentation in the law and identifying what game types can be used in general to model strategic legal dialogues;
(d) combining deontic logics with other systems – e.g., action logics, epistemic logics, preference logics – to grasp legal concepts such as trust, responsibility, and influence.

In a second part this will be complemented by a discussion on how mathematical methods might help to classify and model knowledge in legal systems. Moreover, the power of inference engines and their possible applications in judicature, and abstract semantic models and their applicability to law will be reflected.