Hyperdimensional Modelling of the Legal System in Digital Society

In 2018, the Government of New Zealand started a project called Rules as Code.

In 2020, it proposed to OECD-OPSI the adoption of coding methodology (see Cracking Code report) to create a macro-schema of Law, legally binding, that generates legal text in natural language. It resembles a reverse engineering approach with respect to the predominant method.

It is backed by legal theory and AI&Law literature, where the digitalization of Legal Sources is performed from the legal provisions, expressed in natural language, to its formal-logic representation (AI&Law, LegalXML).

MIT, Stanford CodeX, Australia & Canada governments are investigating this new direction using language programming (e.g., Java, Python).

The intuition seems fascinating, especially in the infosphere where digital artefacts (e.g., IoT, smart contract, AI) need consumable Law to take rapid decisions (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic) often without human intervention (e.g., bots).

However, such an approach can jeopardize legal heritage, democratic principles, institutional foundations, in the context of civil-law theory and EU Law & Human Rights traditions.

This approach seems to neglect 30-years of AI&Law literature, legal theory foundations, philosophy of law and language, to foster a model of technocracy and efficiency.

As the topic calls for timely actions, we aim to create a solid legal theoretical framework to allow the serialization of Law in machine-consumable format while preserving legal soundness.

The output is a digital legal system framework (HyperModeLex) that produces a traced process of digital law-making system, in machine-consumable format (XML, RDF, coding), legally binding, executable, suitable for connected infosphere artefacts (IoT, smart contract, software, bot) and in the meantime explicable to human, using dialogic legal design approach.

We need an interdisciplinary ground-breaking project to assemble various competencies, different disciplines from human and computer sciences.