PriCL: Creating a Precedent A Framework for Reasoning about Privacy Case Law
This addresses the challenge of automating legal analysis in privacy law, offering a novel tool for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental in applying existing logical methods to a new domain.
The authors tackled the problem of automating reasoning about privacy case law by introducing PriCL, the first framework for expressing and reasoning about legal precedents, which enables tasks like deducing permissions and extracting norms with efficient algorithms.
We introduce PriCL: the first framework for expressing and automatically reasoning about privacy case law by means of precedent. PriCL is parametric in an underlying logic for expressing world properties, and provides support for court decisions, their justification, the circumstances in which the justification applies as well as court hierarchies. Moreover, the framework offers a tight connection between privacy case law and the notion of norms that underlies existing rule-based privacy research. In terms of automation, we identify the major reasoning tasks for privacy cases such as deducing legal permissions or extracting norms. For solving these tasks, we provide generic algorithms that have particularly efficient realizations within an expressive underlying logic. Finally, we derive a definition of deducibility based on legal concepts and subsequently propose an equivalent characterization in terms of logic satisfiability.