
The British Nationality Act as a logic program (1986) [pdf] - cjg
http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~sok/papers/s/p370-sergot.pdf
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mbrock
Very interesting. The demo on pp 376 looks useful.

From the conclusion:

> The British Nationality Act 1981 has also proved to be a rich source of
> problems for the use of logic for knowledge representation. It has
> highlighted problems with negation as failure and counterfactual conditions
> in particular. We believe that the formalization of legislation and the
> development of computer systems to assist with legal problem solving and
> decision making provide a rich domain for developing and testing artificial
> intelligence technology. More tentatively, the accumulated experience of
> managing complex systems of law may teach us something about the maintenance
> of large bodies of complex software.

Here's another paper by one of the authors, "Legislation as Logic Programs"
from 1991:
[http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/law.html](http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/law.html)

> In addition to the resemblance between legislation and programs, the law has
> other important similarities with computing. It needs for example to
> validate legislation against social and political specifications, and it
> needs to organise, develop, maintain and reuse large and complex bodies of
> legal codes and procedures. Such parallels between computing and law suggest
> that it might be possible to transfer useful results and techniques in both
> directions between these different fields. One possibility explored in this
> paper is that the linguistic structures of an appropriately extended logic
> programming language might indicate ways in which the language of
> legislation itself could be made simpler and clearer.

