TY - JOUR
T1 - Legal powers, subjections, disabilities, and immunities: Ontological analysis and modeling patterns
AU - Griffo, Cristine
AU - Almeida, João Paulo A.
AU - Lima, João A. O.
AU - Sales, Tiago Prince
AU - Guizzardi, Giancarlo
N1 - Conference code: 42
PY - 2023/11/1
Y1 - 2023/11/1
N2 - The development of dependable information systems in legal contexts requires a precise understanding of the subtleties of the underlying legal phenomena. According to a modern understanding in the philosophy of law, much of these phenomena are relational in nature. In this paper, we employ a theoretically well-grounded legal core ontology (UFO-L) to conduct an ontological analysis focused on fundamental legal relations, namely, the power–subjection and the disability–immunity relations. We show that in certain cases, power–subjection relations are primitive in the sense that by means of institutional acts other legal relations can be generated from them. Examples include relations of rights and duties, permissions and no-rights, liberties, secondary power–subjection, etc. We further show that legal disabilities (and their correlative immunities) are key in constraining the reach of legal powers; together with powers, they form a comprehensive framework for representing the grounds of valid legal acts and to account for the life-cycle of the legal positions that powers create, alter, and possibly extinguish. As a contribution to the practice of conceptual modeling, and leveraging the result of our analysis, we propose conceptual modeling patterns for legal relations, which are then applied to model a real-world case in tax law.
AB - The development of dependable information systems in legal contexts requires a precise understanding of the subtleties of the underlying legal phenomena. According to a modern understanding in the philosophy of law, much of these phenomena are relational in nature. In this paper, we employ a theoretically well-grounded legal core ontology (UFO-L) to conduct an ontological analysis focused on fundamental legal relations, namely, the power–subjection and the disability–immunity relations. We show that in certain cases, power–subjection relations are primitive in the sense that by means of institutional acts other legal relations can be generated from them. Examples include relations of rights and duties, permissions and no-rights, liberties, secondary power–subjection, etc. We further show that legal disabilities (and their correlative immunities) are key in constraining the reach of legal powers; together with powers, they form a comprehensive framework for representing the grounds of valid legal acts and to account for the life-cycle of the legal positions that powers create, alter, and possibly extinguish. As a contribution to the practice of conceptual modeling, and leveraging the result of our analysis, we propose conceptual modeling patterns for legal relations, which are then applied to model a real-world case in tax law.
KW - 2024 OA procedure
KW - UFO-L
KW - Conceptual modeling
KW - Legal power
KW - Disability
KW - Immunity
KW - UFO
U2 - 10.1016/J.DATAK.2023.102219
DO - 10.1016/J.DATAK.2023.102219
M3 - Article
SN - 0169-023X
VL - 148
JO - Data & knowledge engineering
JF - Data & knowledge engineering
M1 - 102219
T2 - 42nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2023
Y2 - 6 November 2023 through 9 November 2023
ER -