Legal powers, subjections, disabilities, and immunities: Ontological analysis and modeling patterns

Cristine Griffo*, João Paulo A. Almeida, João A. O. Lima, Tiago Prince Sales, Giancarlo Guizzardi

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)
54 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Article number102219
Number of pages18
JournalData & knowledge engineering
Volume148
Early online date7 Sept 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2023
Event42nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2023 - Congress Center of the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal
Duration: 6 Nov 20239 Nov 2023
Conference number: 42
https://er2023.inesc-id.pt/

Keywords

  • 2024 OA procedure
  • UFO-L
  • Conceptual modeling
  • Legal power
  • Disability
  • Immunity
  • UFO

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