ABSTRACT
We live in a society where technology plays an increasing role and is often used as an instrument for reducing the operational costs of governments and companies. The use of the Internet as a main communication medium is undeniable. We are confronted with an information overload and large quantities of information are stored on magnetic and optical discs. Our machines become more and more powerful and can perform complex computations at an increasing speed. Economical considerations play an additional important role in the use of information technology. Such an environment forms quite a challenging setting for reflecting on the format, the function, and the application of legislation. This work starts from an analysis of the basic functions of legislation in our constitutional state and of the basic requirements to fulfil these functions. The confrontation with large quantities of legislative documents and the growing complexity of their content force us to get assistance from information technology when managing legislation. Moreover, legal sources are increasingly – or should we say exclusively – consulted online, making the use of information technology a necessity. In addition, the economic situation is a driving factor to ‘technologize’ law in many sectors of society as law becomes imbedded in the hardware and software of devices that we use in our daily life. This chapter aims at answering the following questions. What information technologies are currently available when managing digital legislation? What technology can we expect in the future? What are the advantages of using them? What are the side effects and what are the dangers? An important focus is on how legal theory, and more specifically the study of legal reasoning, will help in building the information technology of the future. If we understand the cognitive behaviour of legal reasoning, comprehend how humans find argumentative knowledge in the legal sources, and are able to identify how legal argument and legal reasoning are explicitly and implicitly expressed in the sources, successful information technology can be designed. Another key issue is the use of representations of legal sources as surrogates of
interpretable by the machine. The representations themselves are increasingly automatically generated based on the original sources. We illustrate the use of the representations with simple and more advanced search engine technology and with a situation where the applicable norms are imbedded in technology. This raises important questions with regard to the basic principles such as the definition of legal sources, their accessibility and their computability. In an era where digitalization of legislation is an irreversible process, these reflections are valuable. In this article we will successively discuss the functions of legislation and the information technology for managing legislation with regard to both the technology that is in use today and the technology that very probably will be used in the near future. The second part reflects on the role of legal reasoning and on the validity of manual and computer-generated representations of the legislative sources. We will conclude with some important directions for future research.
