Abstract
The research for solutions for compliance is mainly focused on the representation of regulative rules, i.e. the imperatives that the industry is asked to comply to. Yet, a relevant part of the legal knowledge contained in regulation cannot be expressed in terms of deontic statements, and is instead represented as constitutive rules. This concept was first introduced by philosophers of language such as J.L. Austin and J.R. Searle and further developed in legal philosophy, where constitutive statements are classified in categories according to their legal effects. The present paper presents a heuristic approach for the representation of alethic statements as part of a methodology aimed at ensuring effective translation of the regulatory text into a machine-readable language. The approach is based on a classification of constitutive statements contained in the work of legal philosophers A.G. Conte and G. Carcaterra. The methodology includes an intermediate language, accompanied by an XML persistence model, and introduces a set of “legal concept patterns” to specifically represent the different constitutive statements. The paper identifies five patterns for the corresponding constitutive statements found in financial regulations: legal definitions, commencement rules, amendments, relative necessities, and party to the law statements.
“Comprendere un diritto significa sapere che cosa esso è, sapere che cosa è significa possederne la definizione.”
Understanding a right implies knowing what it is, and knowing what it is implies possessing its definition.
Carcaterra [9, p. 25].
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- 1.
The concept of constitutivity, as distinguished from the regulative effects of norms, was first introduced by John Rawls [27], with the following distinction: “justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it… [by meaning for] practice any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure”. Austin [3] investigated the phenomenon of the performative utterances, defining them as: “Utterances […] that […] do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are not ‘true or false,’ and the uttering of [which] is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just,’ saying something” (pp. 5–6). The concept of performative utterances was later refined by Searle [32] into that of speech acts and constitutive rules, defined as follows: “[R]egulative rules regulate antecedently or independently existing forms of behaviour […]. But constitutive norms do not merely regulate, they create or define new forms of behaviour. The rules of football or chess, for example […] create the very possibility of playing such games” (p. 33).
- 2.
It is however necessary to be careful in the classification of constitutive rules because it can change depending on the perspective taken [29]: there are views where all rules are constitutive, or none of them are.
- 3.
It is also possible to extend the basic patterns into more complex forms by further specifying its verb concept roles, even introducing verb concepts as roles (e.g. adding the vocabulary entry “person1 shakes hands with person2” with the attribute “general concept: handshake” results in the more complex pattern “person1 shakes hands with person2 counts as agreement in
” – see Fig. 1). - 4.
By combining the SBVR attributes “general concept” and “synonymous (form)”, the Legal Concept Patterns, and verb concept roles, the SMEs effectively build taxonomies – and even simple ontologies – covering portions of the knowledge base (see Fig. 1). Those ontologies are built independently, but can be linked together (e.g. through a common term or pattern). In this way, the burden of enriching the ontology is shared between the SME and the STE, with the first building modules of a legal ontology to express legal concepts, leaving to the latter only the task of merging and consistency checking.
- 5.
Regulation (EU) No. 600/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 May 2014 on markets in financial instruments and amending Regulation (EU) No. 648/2012.
” – see Fig. References
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This work is mainly supported by Enterprise Ireland (EI) and the Irish Development Authority (IDA) under the Government of Ireland Technology Centre Programme.
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Ceci, M., Butler, T., O’Brien, L., Al Khalil, F. (2018). Legal Patterns for Different Constitutive Rules. In: Pagallo, U., Palmirani, M., Casanovas, P., Sartor, G., Villata, S. (eds) AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems. AICOL AICOL AICOL AICOL AICOL 2015 2016 2016 2017 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10791. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00178-0_7
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