Towards a General Many-Sorted Framework for Describing Certain Kinds of Legal Statutes with a Potential Computational Realization
This work addresses the problem of computational legal assistance for complex property transfer issues, though it is incremental as it builds on existing logical and legal traditions.
The paper tackles the formalization of legal statutes by developing a many-sorted first-order logic framework to describe explicit purchase statutes in Sweden, including a concrete syntactic translation of a central statute for immovable property.
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.