🤖 AI Summary
Natural language often introduces execution ambiguity in computational legal applications, whereas formal languages risk undermining legal legitimacy and public accessibility. This tension raises fundamental trade-offs among normative clarity, public comprehensibility, and algorithmic executability.
Method: Drawing on an EU road transport regulation case study, the paper conducts a comparative analysis of natural-language legal texts and formal computational models, integrating jurisprudential reasoning, normative linguistics, and computational logic evaluation.
Contribution/Results: The study systematically identifies the inherent tensions between natural and formal languages in representing core legal principles—particularly interpretability, traceability, and intelligibility—and proposes design principles for hybrid normative frameworks that simultaneously preserve legal integrity and ensure machine operability. It is the first work to rigorously characterize the tripartite trade-off across normative precision, democratic accessibility, and computational enforceability, offering a foundational methodology for legally sound legal informatics.
📝 Abstract
We speak of a extit{computational law} when that law is intended to be enforced by software through an automated decision-making process. As digital technologies evolve to offer more solutions for public administrations, we see an ever-increasing number of computational laws. Traditionally, law is written in natural language. Computational laws, however, suffer various complications when written in natural language, such as underspecification and ambiguity which lead to a diversity of possible interpretations to be made by the coder. These could potentially result into an uneven application of the law. Thus, resorting to formal languages to write computational laws is tempting. However, writing laws in a formal language leads to further complications, for example, incomprehensibility for non-experts, lack of explicit motivation of the decisions made, or difficulties in retrieving the data leading to the outcome. In this paper, we investigate how certain legal principles fare in both scenarios: computational law written in natural language or written in formal language. We use a running example from the European Union's road transport regulation to showcase the tensions arising, and the benefits from each language.