The Role of Pragmatics in Legal Norm Representation
This work addresses the challenge of accurately modeling legal reasoning for knowledge representation systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing philosophical frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of representing legal norms by highlighting the role of pragmatics, beyond semantics, to address intentional vagueness in legal texts, specifically in patent law, using theories from Grice and Marmor.
Despite the 'apparent clarity' of a given legal provision, its application may result in an outcome that does not exactly conform to the semantic level of a statute. The vagueness within a legal text is induced intentionally to accommodate all possible scenarios under which such norms should be applied, thus making the role of pragmatics an important aspect also in the representation of a legal norm and reasoning on top of it. The notion of pragmatics considered in this paper does not focus on the aspects associated with judicial decision making. The paper aims to shed light on the aspects of pragmatics in legal linguistics, mainly focusing on the domain of patent law, only from a knowledge representation perspective. The philosophical discussions presented in this paper are grounded based on the legal theories from Grice and Marmor.