Automated Reasoning in Normative Detachment Structures with Ideal Conditions

Systems of deontic logic suffer either from being too expressive and therefore hard to mechanize, or from being too simple to capture relevant aspects of normative reasoning. In this article we look for a suitable way in between: the automation of a simple logic of normative ideality and sub-ideality that is not affected by many deontic paradoxes and that is expressive enough to capture contrary-to-duty reason- ing. We show that this logic is very useful to reason on normative scenarios from which one can extract a certain kind of argumentative structure, called a Normative Detachment Structure with Ideal Conditions. The theoretical analysis of the logic is accompanied by examples of automated reasoning on a concrete legal text

The NAI Suite -- Drafting and Reasoning over Legal Texts

A prototype for automated reasoning over legal texts, called NAI, is presented. As an input, NAI accepts formalized logical representations of such legal texts that can be created and curated using an integrated annotation interface. The prototype supports automated reasoning over the given text representation and multiple quality assurance procedures. The pragmatics of the NAI suite as well its feasibility in practical applications is studied on a fragment of the Smoking Prohibition (Children in Motor Vehicles) (Scotland) Act 2016 of the Scottish Parliament