1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen, whom I shall call Hercules. I suppose that Hercules is a judge in some representative American jurisdiction. I assume that he accepts the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction. He accepts, that is, that statutes have the general power to create and extinguish legal rights, and that judges have the general duty to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l

Taking Rights Seriously

Taking Rights Seriously.

In competitive markets, companies need well-designed business strategies if they seek to grow and obtain sustainable competitive advantage. At the core of a successful business strategy there is a carefully crafted value proposition, which ultimately defines what a company delivers to its customers. Despite their widely recognized importance, there is however little agreement on what exactly value propositions are. This lack of conceptual clarity harms the communication among stakeholders and the harmonization of current business strategy theories and strategy support frameworks. Furthermore, it hinders the development of systematic methodologies for crafting value propositions, as well as adequate support for representing and analyzing them. In this paper, we present an ontological analysis of value propositions based on a review of most relevant business and marketing theories and on previous work on value ascription, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). Our investigation clarifies how value propositions are different from value presentations, and shows the difference between value propositions at the business level from those related to specific offerings.

An Ontological Analysis of Value Propositions

For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the ontological foundations of Conceptual Modeling by participating to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and the UFO-based modeling language OntoUML, which have been successfully employed in a number of different sectors. The empirical feedback from these experiences led us to reconsider UFO’s theory of relations, proposing a new theory that has already been applied to model subtle notions in the business domain, such as value, risk, service, and contract. In this paper, we advance a first formal characterization of this new theory, which is then used to design a new metamodel for OntoUML.

Relations in Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling

Over the last 30 years, AI & Law has provided breakthroughs in studies involving case-based reasoning, rule-based reasoning, information retrieval and, most recently, conceptual models for knowledge representation and reasoning, known as Legal Ontologies. Ontologies have been widely used by legal practitioners, scholars, and lay people in a variety of situations, such as simulating legal actions, semantic search and indexing, and to keep up-to-date with the continual change of laws and regulations. Given the high number of legal ontologies produced, the need to summarize this research realm through a well-defined methodological procedure is urgent need. This study presents the results of a systematic mapping of the literature, aiming at categorizing legal ontologies along certain dimensions, such as purpose, level of generality, underlying legal theories, among other aspects. The reasons to carry out a systematic mapping are twofold: in addition to explaining the maturation of the area over recent decades, it helps to avoid the old problem of reinventing the wheel. Through organizing and classifying what has already been produced, it is possible to realize that the development of legal ontologies can rise to the level of reusability where prefabricated models might be coupled with new and more complex ontologies for practical law.

Legal ontologies over time: A systematic mapping study

Service contracts bind parties legally, regulating their behavior in the scope of a (business) service relationship. Given that there are legal consequences attached to service contracts, understanding the elements of a contract is key to managing services in an enterprise. After all, provisions in a service contract establish obligations and rights for service providers and customers that must be respected in service delivery. The importance of service contracts to service provisioning in an enterprise has motivated us to investigate their representation in enterprise models. We have observed that approaches fall into two extremes of a spectrum. Some approaches, such as ArchiMate, offer an opaque "contract" construct, not revealing the rights and obligations in the scope of the governed service relationship. Other approaches, under the umbrella term "contract languages", are devoted exactly to the formal representation of the contents of contracts. Despite the applications of contract languages, they operate at a level of detail that does not match that of enterprise architecture models. In this paper, we explore the gap between these two extremes. We address the representation of service contract elements with a systematic approach: we first propose a well-founded service contract ontology, and then extend the ArchiMate language to reflect the elements of the service contract ontology. The applicability of the proposed extension is assessed in the representation of a real-world cloud service contract.

From an Ontology of Service Contracts to Contract Modeling in Enterprise Architecture

Over the last decades, the field of legal ontologies has seen a sharp increase in the number of published papers. The literature on legal ontologies now covers a wide variety of topics and research approaches. One of these topics is legal core ontologies, which have received significant attention since the 1990s. In order to provide an up-to-date overview of this research area, this article presents a systematic mapping study of published researches on legal core ontologies. The selected papers were analyzed and categorized according to the perspective of their main contribution as well as according to the legal theories used. The study reveals that only a small number of studies use legal theories suitable to address current societal challenges.

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A Systematic Mapping of the Literature on Legal Core Ontologies.

Legal relations abound in conceptual modeling. Despite that, the representation of these relations in the area has not yet received sufficient theoretical support. We address this by establishing a basis for the well-founded representation of legal relations. We capture a comprehensive set of legal relations (and legal positions within these legal relations) that arise from widely accepted legal theories into a legal core ontology called UFO-L [14, 15], which is grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). We rely on the Theory of Constitutional Rights proposed by the philosopher of law Robert Alexy. This theory extends the system of legal positions proposed by the jurist Wesley Hohfeld, which has been used as a theoretical basis for several works in the conceptual modeling literature. The result is a modeling strategy for legal relations that in- corporates patterns from the legal core ontology. We present here a synthesis of empirical studies conducted to evaluate the aforementioned results. The studies show that the approach based on UFO-L produces models that are more comprehensible and clear for the representation of legal contracts.

Conceptual Modeling of Legal Relations

This paper extends UFO-L, a Legal Core Ontology (LCO) based on Robert Alexy’s Theory of Constitutional Rights and grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). We present the first pattern of UFO-L’s patterns catalogue and its application. The general idea is to use these ontological patterns to support the modeling of legal concepts in conceptual models of the legal domain. Moreover, our approach has the specific purpose of emphasizing the use of a relational perspective rather than a normative perspective of the Law.

A Pattern for the Representation of Legal Relations in a Legal Core Ontology.

Computer and Law is a transdisciplinary research field, which has received increasing attention from researchers in the past twenty-five years (BenchCapon, T. et al, 2012). The problem of presenting the legal domain has been investigated in different perspectives by researchers, such as (Stamper, 1977), (Hafner, 1980), and (McCarty 1989), one of them is the ontological perspective. From NORMA proposed by (Stamper, 1991) to JudO ontology used in the Judiciary Framework proposed by (Ceci, 2013) and to LOTED2 proposed by (Distinto et al., 2014), ontologies have been used as a means of representing legal concepts. Specifically, there are some kind of ontologies called legal core ontologies (LCO), which represent generic legal concepts (e.g. legal norm, legal fact, and legal relation), usable in different legal domains. Some examples of legal core ontologies are: FBO proposed by (Kralingen, 1997), FOLaw proposed by (Valente, 1995), Core Legal Ontology (CLO) proposed by (Gangemi, 2007), and LRI-Core built by Leibiniz Centre for Law Research Group (Breuker and Hoekstra, 2004b). Ontologies are a response for the paradigm shift, from static data storage in databases disconnected to Linked Data and Semantic Web (Isotani and Bittencourt, n.d), (Kuhn et al. 2014). Specifically, the use of core ontologies in complex domains, such as the legal domain, allows: 1) the reusability of generic concepts and semantic interoperability; 2) the expressiveness gain in languages based on ontologies, as well as clarity and correctness of the represented domain (Guizzardi, 2005). Despite the efforts of researchers in the search for a computational solution that satisfactorily represent the legal domain, frequently research has not taken into account the use of legal theories, resulting in a gap between the conceptualizations that are typically considered in the areas of Computer Science and the study of the Law. In a preview systematic mapping of the literature on legal core ontologies, from 128 studies selected, in the time interval of 1995-2014, we have found out that only 35 (approx. 27%) used primary sources of legal theories; 44 studies (approx. 34%) used indirect sources (e.g. use a LCO based on a legal theory to build a domain ontology); and 49 studies (approx. 38%) did not use any legal theory as primary source (Griffo et al., 2015a). This gap has been the subject of several papers, among them, the paper Artificial Intelligence and Legal Theory at Law Schools written by Gordon (Gordon, 2005), who suggested the introduction of an interdisciplinary subject in law schools. Also, in the paper Ontologies: the Missing link between Legal Theory and AI & Law, (Valente and Breuker, 1994) ontologies are presented as a missing link between AI & Law, emphasizing the importance of using legal theories as basis in Computer and Law research. Recently, Casanovas (Casanovas, 2012) wrote about the remaining gap, pointing out the nature of legal world and the computational reductionism as causes of this gap. In fact, to conduct research in a field composed by two distinct knowledge areas, it is necessary to have a consistent knowledge of both areas in order to produce suitable solutions. If we assume the premise that the use of legal theories decreases the gap between Computing and Law, then the next question is: what particular legal theory should be considered by the ontologist? We defend, in this Ph.D. proposal, that the choice of a legal theory must take into account the needs of the contemporary juridical world. In this sense, the choice of a legal theory that does not take account the importance of principles as legal norms will result in a non-flexible computing solution, distant from the juridical reality. For this reason, we have chosen Alexy’s Theory of Fundamental Rights (Alexy, 2010), (Alexy, 2003) as proposed in (Griffo et al., 2015b). Alexy’s theory of Constitutional Rights or Alexy’s theory of Fundamental Rights addresses some problems of Legal Positivism by proposing the (1) Structure of Constitutional Right Norms and the

Cristine Griffo

Papers

From an Ontology of Service Contracts to Contract Modeling in Enterprise Architecture

A Systematic Mapping of the Literature on Legal Core Ontologies.

Conceptual Modeling of Legal Relations

A Pattern for the Representation of Legal Relations in a Legal Core Ontology.

UFO-L: A Core Ontology of Legal Concepts Built from a Legal Relations Perspective