The quest of standardising law. LegalXML and LeXML.
ABSTRACT
Since 1998, LegalXML/Lexml have been working to develop new XML-based standards for law. The possibility to represent legal structures with XML creates new tools and communication-mechanisms and asks for a new relationship of legal and technical norms.
Since 1998, LegalXML in the US and Lexml in Europe have been working to develop new XML-based standards for law. The possibility to design and represent legal structures with XML creates new tools and communication-mechanisms and asks for a new relationship of legal and technical norms.
Whereas the question of how logic can be applied in law and legal argumentation is a purely theoretic one, the question and the task to introduce XML-based document type definitions and schemas makes it necessary to reflect the underlying communication goals and the structural definition of legal texts and documents.
This improves the storage and retrieval of legal documents as well as the communication between different parties in the legal domain and beyond it. For example, automated and formular based processing can enhance and fasten the contact of administration and tax offices and the citizens. Legal professionals can communicate directly with the courts and courts may communicate with each other and with the public using predefined documenttypes.
Because law and lawyers for many centuries have focused primarily on the semantic content of the laws to regulate everyday life, the idea to rely more heavily on the structure of legal norms and bills, which are implicitly emphasised by XML as structured markup language, will need time to grow. Nevertheless, the amount of cost to be cut relying on XML in the administrative domain is enormous. XML-based administrative information systems will accelerate this process in the near future.
Further positive effects of using XML in the legal domain include transparency (standardised open format), effectiveness (standardised exchange formats) and overview and accessability using metadata standards and visualisation techniques (RDF, Topic Maps).
On the other hand, "e-commerce" regarded as geographically unbound, desubjectivated, electronically mediated negotiating and contracting tend to weaken the normative power of the law, because technologically mediated "silent commerce" and "silent contracts" come in the first place, and the legal norms follow up in the second.
Therefore LegalXML and Lexml carry the load to prepare formal legal structures which enable law using the technical means to enforce and secure e-commerce its safe and secure environment to blossom under legally stable cirumstances. Hopefully, the work of these groups will also be noticed by the lawmakers as assistance to get aware of these new developments inside and outside of the legal system. To declare legal text structures represented by XML schemas as legally valid may be the first step in that direction.
Further information can be obtained on the website http://www.legalxml.org/ and http://www.lexml.de/ as well as http://www.lexml.at/, which is hosted by http://www.rechtsinformatik.at/. The latter is a private research institute, founded by Peter Ebenhoch and Felix Gantner, which shaped the "Saarbrücker Standard", a schema to represent judgements in Germany.