Logic and Reasoning

Legal reasoning has its own features that makes it different from other forms of reasoning. Changes to norms, are expressed by norms themselves, and norms and legal concepts are artefacts created by the legislator. However, changes in a normative system impact whether existing information systems compliant with the current set of norms are still in compliance with the revised legislation. To address this issue the first problem is to classify the different types of norm modifications (e.g., difference between abrogation and annulment, where in the former case the effects of a norm are to be cancelled, but in the later case), to understand how to represent meta-norms (norms specifying how to modify other norms), how to efficiently reason with them, and finally to determine the impact of norm modification on existing business processes and identifying how to recover compliance when the processes are no longer compliant. This means to determine what operations are required to restore compliance and on what parts of a process such operations have to be applied. The problems to be addressed are likely to be computationally hard.