introduction - normativeai/guide GitHub Wiki

We present The Normative Reasoner, a tool that can help lawyers to reason automatically given legal text and its logical representation. The Normative Reasoner is based on automated deduction, which is a field of research in artificial intelligence whose outputs are potentially relevant for reasoning in the legal domain; however, only few connections between the two areas have been explored so far. In particular, recent years have witnessed several attempts at making general and freely-available tools for automated reasoning accessible to experts of legal texts; the NAI tool is one of these tools. The interpretation of legal texts and regulations depends on many factors such as experience and context. Nevertheless, once an interpretation is given, a computer can help in these ways:

  1. It can check if the interpretation is consistent. Inconsistencies among legal norms mean there are two (or more) legal norms that pursue the opposite intention, which is an undesirable and confusing phenomenon. This situation may, in extreme cases, lead to the abolition of one of the norms by the constitutional judicial authority. In contracts, this situation can lead to problems with the interpretation and, in extreme cases, to the termination of the contract. For example, contradictory conclusions can be that you are obliged to build a fence around your house but, at the same time, you are permitted not to.
  2. It can check whether some norms are redundant and can therefore be removed without harming the correctness of the legal document. Considering contracts again, redundant obligations may be frequent. For example, a contractual party might have an obligation to provide the services at the agreed quality level to the other party. The contract may contain a provision that if a party violates an obligation in the contract, it has to pay fines. At the same time, the contract contains an article stating that if a party does not provide the service quality at the agreed level, it should pay a fine too. The second clause is redundant, because the general provision to pay a fine for any violation of an obligation in the contract subsumes the one for violating more specific cases.
  3. It can help reasoning fully automatically. For example, given that I signed the contract and a part of the service is of the agreed quality while another is of inferior one, am I entitled for a reimbursement?