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

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.