Information technology has now pervaded the legal sector, and the very modern concepts of e-law and e-justice show that automation processes are ubiquitous. European policies on transparency and information society, in particular, require the use of technology and its steady improvement. Some of the revised papers presented in this book originate from a workshop held at the European University Institute of Florence, Italy, in December 2006. The workshop was devoted to the discussion of the different ways of understanding and explaining contemporary law, for the purpose of building computable models of it -- especially models enabling the development of computer applications for the legal domain. During the course of the following year, several new contributions, provided by a number of ongoing (or recently finished) European projects on computation and law, were received, discussed and reviewed to complete the survey. This book presents 20 thoroughly refereed revised papers on the hot topics under research in different EU projects: legislative XML, legal ontologies, semantic web, search and meta-search engines, web services, system architecture, dialectic systems, dialogue games, multi-agent systems (MAS), legal argumentation, legal reasoning, e-justice, and online dispute resolution. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation, ontologies and XML legislative drafting; knowledge representation, legal ontologies and information retrieval; argumentation and legal reasoning; normative and multi-agent systems; and online dispute resolution.

Information technology has now pervaded the legal sector, and the very modern concepts of e-law and e-justice show that automation processes are ubiquitous. European policies on transparency and information society, in particular, require the use of technology and its steady improvement. Some of the revised papers presented in this book originate from a workshop held at the European University Institute of Florence, Italy, in December 2006. The workshop was devoted to the discussion of the different ways of understanding and explaining contemporary law, for the purpose of building computable models of it -- especially models enabling the development of computer applications for the legal domain. During the course of the following year, several new contributions, provided by a number of ongoing (or recently finished) European projects on computation and law, were received, discussed and reviewed to complete the survey. This book presents 20 thoroughly refereed revised papers on the hot topics under research in different EU projects: legislative XML, legal ontologies, semantic web, search and meta-search engines, web services, system architecture, dialectic systems, dialogue games, multi-agent systems (MAS), legal argumentation, legal reasoning, e-justice, and online dispute resolution. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation, ontologies and XML legislative drafting; knowledge representation, legal ontologies and information retrieval; argumentation and legal reasoning; normative and multi-agent systems; and online dispute resolution.

The inspiring idea of this workshop series, Artificial Intelligence Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems (AICOL), is to develop models of legal knowledge, concerning organization, structure and content, in order to promote mutual understanding and communication between different systems and cultures. Complexity and complex systems describe recent developments in AI and law, legal theory, argumentation, the Semantic Web, and multi-agent systems. The aim of the AICOL workshops is thus to offer effective support for the exchange of knowledge and methodological approaches between scholars from different scientific fields, by highlighting their similarities and differences. The comparison of multiple formal approaches to the law (such as logical models, cognitive theories, argumentation frameworks, graph theory, game theory), as well as opposite perspectives like internal and the external viewpoints, this volume stresses possible convergences, as, for instance, are possible in the realms of conceptual structures, argumentation schemes, emergent behaviors, learning evolution, adaptation, and simulation. This volume assembles 15 thoroughly refereed and revised papers, selected from two workshops organized at the XXIV World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR, Beijing, China, September 15-20, 2009) and at JURIX-09 (December 16-19, 2009, Rotterdam). The papers are organized in topical sections on language and complex systems in law, ontologies and the representation of legal knowledge, argumentation and logics, as well as dialogue and legal multimedia.

Recent years have seen much new research on the interface between artificial intelligence and law, looking at issues such as automated legal reasoning. This collection of papers represents the state of the art in this fascinating and highly topical field.

The book provides the reader with a unique source regarding the current theoretical landscape in legal ontology engineering as well as on foreseeable future trends for the definition of conceptual structures to enhance the automatic processing and retrieval of legal information in the Semantic Web framework. It will thus interest researchers in the domains of the SW, legal informatics, Artificial Intelligence and law, legal theory and legal philosophy, as well as developers of e-government applications based on the intelligent management of legal or public information to provide both back-office and front-office support.

The inspiring idea of this workshop series, Artificial Intelligence Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems (AICOL), is to develop models of legal knowledge concerning organization, structure, and content in order to promote mutual understanding and communication between different systems and cultures. Complexity and complex systems describe recent developments in AI and law, legal theory, argumentation, the Semantic Web, and multi-agent systems. Multisystem and multilingual ontologies provide an important opportunity to integrate different trends of research in AI and law, including comparative legal studies. Complexity theory, graph theory, game theory, and any other contributions from the mathematical disciplines can help both to formalize the dynamics of legal systems and to capture relations among norms. Cognitive science can help the modeling of legal ontology by taking into account not only the formal features of law but also social behaviour, psychology, and cultural factors. This book is thus meant to support scholars in different areas of science in sharing knowledge and methodological approaches. This volume collects the contributions to the workshop's third edition, which took place as part of the 25th IVR congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, held in Frankfurt, Germany, in August 2011. This volume comprises six main parts devoted to the each of the six topics addressed in the workshop, namely: models for the legal system ethics and the regulation of ICT, legal knowledge management, legal information for open access, software agent systems in the legal domain, as well as legal language and legal ontology.

The 22nd edition of the JURIX conference was held in Rotterdam on the 17th and 18th December and was hosted by the Erasmus University Rotterdam. While the conference was back to its country of origin, JURIX continues to attract a wide international audience. This year, the conference received submissions from all five continents. This clearly demonstrates the lively and growing interest for the highly interdisciplinary discipline of legal informatics. The selection of papers for this edition of JURIX covers a wide variety of topics in legal informatics, including contributions on established fields such as legal document management, argumentation, case based reasoning, dispute resolution, support for legal drafting and ontologies, to emerging areas such as regulatory compliance, normative multi-agent systems and game theory, as well as application areas, for example, fraud detection, legal tutoring systems and legal decision support systems.