Towards a General Many-Sorted Framework for Describing Certain Kinds of Legal Statutes with a Potential Computational Realization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a many-sorted first-order logic framework grounded in physical objects to formalize legal statutes, exemplified by Swedish property purchase laws, aiming to aid in developing AI legal assistants.

Contribution

It presents a novel formal framework for describing legal statutes using many-sorted logic, bridging legal theory and computational logic with practical applications.

Findings

Formal translation of Swedish property law statute

Framework grounded in physical objects and situations

Potential for AI legal assistance development

Abstract

Examining a 20th-century Scandinavian legal theoretical tradition, we can extract an ontological naturalistic, a logical empiristic, and a modern idealistic rationale. We introduce the mathematical syntactic figure present in the `logical empiricism' in a contemporary mathematical logic. A new formal framework for describing explicit purchase statutes (Sweden) is gradually developed and subsequently proposed. This new framework is based on a many-sorted first-order logic (MFOL) approach, where the semantics are grounded in concrete `physical' objects and situations with a legal relevance. Specifically, we present a concrete formal syntactic translation of one of the central statutes of Swedish legislation for the purchase of immovable property. Additionally, we discuss the potential implications that a subsequent development of such formalisations would have for constructing artificial agents (e.g., software) that can be used as `co-creative' legal assistance for solving highly complex legal issues concerning the transfer of property, among others.