Visualization of Legal Informatics

Abstract

This paper explores the subject matter of legal informatics. The life-long work of the first author concerning the visualization and coding of statutes is generalized. Besides positive law and customary law, the emergence of machine law is a current topic of focus in the literature. In machine law, legal acts are posited by machines and not by humans (primarily in a situational context). The transformation of a legal act to a legal document can happen in two ways. First, it is a transformation of the legal act into explicit punctuation, for example, for announcement in the case of laws or for written execution in the case of judgments, and, second, as a trend towards electronic documents. Legal theory forms a meta-level to the law and similarly legal informatics forms a meta-level to legal information. Legal informatics in Austria is based on the work of Ota Weinberger, Ilmar Tammelo and Leo Reisinger and has been developed by Erich Schweighofer in the framework of the IRIS conferences. Legal informatics is distinguished from legal information, whereas legal logic and meta-theories appear on top of legal informatics. In terms of syntax, machine culture is characterized by formal notations. Notations of legal logic are just the beginning; the target is a technical notation, a basis for programming. Visualizations are in the middle. On the one hand, visualizations serve to understand people by breaking away from the textual; on the other hand, by emphasizing the formal they form a bridge to machines. Legal text can be translated directly into formal languages, but visualizations can facilitate this task as an intermediate methodological step. Hans-Georg Fill’s metamodeling can be seen as a metameta-level.