A Model of Legal Acts: Part 1: The World of Law

Abstract

This paper aims at providing an account of legal acts that forms a suitable starting point for the creation of computational systems that deal with legal acts. The paper is divided into two parts. Because legal acts will be analyzed as intentional changes in the world of law, the ‘furniture’ of this world, that consists broadly speaking of entities, facts and rules, plays a central role in the analysis. This first part of the paper deals with this furniture and its philosophical underpinnings, and at the same time introduces most of the logical apparatus that will be used to deal with it. The focus in the first part is on static and dynamic legal rules and their interplay in constituting the world of law.

Keywords: legal acts, dynamic legal rules, static legal rules, counts as rules, doctrinal concepts, internal legal concepts