AICOL2013-Belo Horizonte

Thematic workshop of the IVR XXVI Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Full day Workshop – day (to be defined)
21 and 27 July 2013

NEWS! extension for the abstract submission: March 13th, 2013

Rationale

After a first experience in Beijing (IVR XXIV – September 15-20, 2009 Beijing, China), the follow up in Rotterdam (JURIX-09 – Rotterdam – November 16-18, The Netherlands), and the successful second edition in Frankfurt a. M. (IVR XXV – August 15-20, 2011 Frankfurt, Germany), we submit the fourth edition of AICOL (AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems) as a thematic workshop of the IVR XXVI Belo Horizonte, 21-27 July 2013.

The previous AICOL editions, as the forthcoming ones, are conceived as a meeting point for diverse researchers (legal theorists, political scientists, linguists, logicians, and computational and cognitive scientists) eager to discuss and share their findings and proposals. In this sense, complexity and complex systems sum up the perspective chosen to describe recent developments in AI and law, legal theory, argumentation, the semantic web, and multi-agent systems.

This work has produced significant outcomes collected in the following publications, edited by Springer – LNAI:

AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems I and II
AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems III

The new selected papers of AICOL IV at IVR XXVI (2013) are forthcoming.

The Aim of the Special Workshop

The inspiring idea of AICOL is three-fold. First, the aim is to further develop models of legal knowledge, concerning its organization, structure and content, in order to promote mutual understanding and communication between different legal systems and cultures. By achieving more precise models of legal concepts – from multilingual dictionaries to taxonomies and legal ontologies, namely formal models of legal conceptualization – we enhance our comprehension of legal cultures, of their commonalities and differences. Moreover, by increasingly profiting from computer support in managing legal knowledge, it is feasible both drawing on convergences and bridging differences for deeper understanding of today’s legal challenges.

Secondly, the comparison of multiple formal approaches to the law – such as logical models, cognitive theories, argumentation frameworks, graph theory, complexity theory, cybernetics, game theory as well as opposite perspectives like the internal and the external viewpoints – should stress possible convergences in the realm of, say, conceptual structures, argumentation schemes, emergent behaviours, learning evolution, adaptation, simulation, etc. By promoting a fruitful interaction between some of the most relevant contributions to AI research on contemporary legal systems, special attention is paid to the most recent research in the field, e.g., the use of sentimental analysis in crowd-sourcing for preventing geopolitical crises, e-discovery in legal firms and tribunals, gamification in legal environment, and so forth.

Finally, the AICOL workshop welcomes research in political and legal theory, jurisprudence, philosophy of technology and the law, to address the ways in which the current information revolution affects basic pillars of today’s legal and political systems, in such fields as e-democracy, e-government, transnational governance, etc. We are indeed dealing with changes and develops that occur at a rapid pace, as the law transforms itself, in order to respond and progress alongside the advances of technology. In addition to the traditional hard and soft law-tools of governance, such as national rules, international treaties, codes of conduct, guidelines, or the standardization of best practices, the new scenarios of the information revolution have increasingly suggested the aim to govern current ICTs-driven societies through the mechanisms of design, codes and architectures. AI approaches to the complexity of legal systems should take into account how the regulatory tools of technology impact on canonical interpretations of the law, such as the General Theory of the Law and the State’s definition (Kelsen 1949: 26), according to which “what distinguishes the legal order from all other social orders is the fact that it regulates human behaviour by means of a specific technique.” It is plain that, once such technique regulates other techniques and, moreover, the process of technological innovation, we should conceive the law as a meta-technology.