How the Law Has Become Computable

In this chapter we will examine the different ways in which law has progressively merged with computing, through research and applications in legal informatics. The goal is twofold: on the one hand to show that legal informatics builds upon legal premises (content, processes, concepts and theories), and on the other hand to show how research in legal informatics can make a contribution to legal studies (at the doctrinal, and theoretical level). We will distinguish different aspects of law which have been modelled for the purpose of computation, and the different ways in which the researcher or developer of legal informatics applications have adressed the law. In particular we shall show how research meant to provide computable models of the law – document retrieval, conceptual constructions (ontologies), logical reasoning, argumentation, symbolic (rule-based) or sub-symbolic (data-driven) inference – has addressed of different aspects of legal knowledge and cognition.