Stare decisis, legal certainty and the concept of economic activity, regarding the VAT treatment of public bodies

Stare decisis is the doctrine whereby judges and courts rely on previous cases to support a current decision. This doctrine has been associated with legal reasoning and with positive outcomes such as continuity, stability and predictability of the legal system . In the EU, the ECJ does not strictly adhere to this doctrine, unlike common-law systems. However, this court seldom depart from its case law, developing “building blocks” which gather a coherent corpus of decisions in a continuous line of reasoning. Therefore, it can be said that the ECJ operates a rather de facto stare decisis . This is in light with doctrinal requirements, whereby judges should enjoy flexibility to not follow its previous judgments. Otherwise, they will be at the risk of stagnating, and so their jurisprudence might be left outdated. However, the principle of legal certainty requires that legal relationships governed by EU law remain foreseeable. For this to happen, the ECJ should adhere to its pre-established case law, unless there is a reason that excuse departing from it, as well as it should justify their judgements rationally. This is particularly important when the ECJ deals with hard cases, because they, in order to be solved, require a second-order of justification and combination of logos, ethos and pathos arguments, which involve, precisely, reliance on case law and coherency with the law. An example of hard cases are the judgments that deal with the concept of economic activity. Thereon, the ECJ has developed a “building block” which brought about what I call the economic-nature criteria. These are a set of guidelines that aim to “decipher” the essence of the concept of economic activity laid down in the second subparagraph of article 9(1) of the VAT Directive. In particular, the referred criteria assess whether a transaction is of an economic nature. They are of great importance because the economic nature of an activity is what determines whether an activity lies or not within the scope of the VAT Directive . However, in cases regarding the assessment of the concept of economic activity in the light of the VAT treatment of public bodies, the ECJ departed from the referred economic-nature criteria. Although, it is not strictly obliged by its case law, not following its case law, without justifying so may jeopardize the very nature of the principle of legal certainty, since legal situations may not be foreseeable

Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support

A framework and methodology---termed LogiKEy---for the design and engineering of ethical reasoners, normative theories and deontic logics is presented. The overall motivation is the development of suitable means for the control and governance of intelligent autonomous systems. LogiKEy's unifying formal framework is based on semantical embeddings of deontic logics, logic combinations and ethico-legal domain theories in expressive classic higher-order logic (HOL). This meta-logical approach enables the provision of powerful tool support in LogiKEy: off-the-shelf theorem provers and model finders for HOL are assisting the LogiKEy designer of ethical intelligent agents to flexibly experiment with underlying logics and their combinations, with ethico-legal domain theories, and with concrete examples---all at the same time. Continuous improvements of these off-the-shelf provers, without further ado, leverage the reasoning performance in LogiKEy. Case studies, in which the LogiKEy framework and methodology has been applied and tested, give evidence that HOL's undecidability often does not hinder efficient experimentation.Comment: 50 pages; 10 figure

Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: An ontological approach

This is the post-print version of the Paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerSupporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.This work is funded by the European Commission under the 2006/1 eParticipation call