Social Change Through Computerized Accessibility of Legal Rules

This article presents a self-help software system that makes rights accessible through an on-line interview. The interview is based on a formal model of the relevant jurisprudence and does not require the involvement of a service representative, only a user who wants to understand his or her rights. In addition, the article provides a methodology for building models and interviews for similar social contexts and describes building a model for workers’ rights according to Israeli law, upon completing their employment. In addition to conducting interviews, these models can be used to create diagrams and perform legal queries. This kind of system can fulfill a central role in empowering disadvantaged populations, as it enables people to asses their rights in a user-friendly manner, which is personalized to the situation of the interviewee and not overburdened with large amounts of information that it is difficult to navigate. PolicyModels— the system presented here—can be used in different contexts, such as modeling privacy requirements in databases.