LN2FR 2022: Workshop on Methodologies for Translating Legal Norms into
Formal Representations in conjunction with JURIX 2022, the 35th International
Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Workshop date: December 14th, 2022, Saarbrücken, Germany (the workshop
will likely be conducted as a hybrid event).
Deadline for submission: November 3th, 2022.

Motivation
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Using symbolic logic or similar methods of knowledge representation 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 LN2FR seeks to explore the various challenges connected with
the task of using formal languages and models to represent legal norms in
a machine-readable manner.

Topics
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LN2FR seeks to discuss current research questions concerning (among others):

- Knowledge representation methods applicable to legal norms (especially traffic
rules), including different types of (deontic) logic or comparable formalisms
- Formalisation of 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)

Scope
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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
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People interested in participating are invited to submit short (5-9 pages) or long papers (10-14 pages) in PDF before November 3rd 2022
via easychair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=ln2fr.
Please use the Springer LNCS format style to prepare your submission.

Authors of the accepted papers will present at the workshop (remote
participation will likely be possible). The publication of the accepted
papers (workshop–proceedings) is intended.

Organizers
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Georg Borges (Saarland University, Germany)
Ken Satoh (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
Erich Schweighofer (Univeristy of Vienna, Austria)