1.

The British Nationality Act as A Logic

Program

The British Nationality Act as A Logic Program

Yu Chen, 03722670

Summary

The regulation of British Nationality Act (BNA) 1981 can be formulated as a more succinct logic
form such as a decision tree or Prolog format.
The BNA experiment demonstrated the feasibility of implementing rules and regulations in
legislation.
Law problem solving and decision making provide a source for the development of artificial
systems.

Three positive aspects

A logical form of some laws or regulation such as BNA offers advantages for legal systems of
human including: 1). identify and eliminate unintended ambiguity and imprecision; 2). simplify the
natural language statement; 3). derive logical consequences of the rules.
The formalization of legislation and legal reasoning benefits the development of computer science
and technology.
A legal system in cumputer is much easier to maintain requiring less expert resources.

Three criticisms

It is difficult to express some laws or legal reasoning that highly rely on human explanation or huge
paragraph of natural language, since the paper only thoughly demonstrate the BNA case.
Different computer-executable formalism may achive different results depending on the logic form
of programming language.

The process of implementing law-decision-making or legal reasoning system requires correctly

understand each law and how this law will be applied, but this is stressful for programmers.

Three questions to the author

How to ensure programmers correctly understand all laws and how these laws will be implemented
when they formulate these into the artificial system in computers?

How to build a evaluation system or session for the legal reasoning system before putting it into real
application?
Which laws or legal reasoning process still cannot be formulated into a computer program?