Legal Power-Subjection Relations: Ontological Analysis and Modeling Pattern

The development of dependable information systems in legal contexts requires a precise understanding of the subtleties of the underlying legal phenomena. According to a modern understanding in philosophy of law, much of these phenomena are relational in nature. In this paper, we employ a theoretically well-grounded legal core ontology (UFO-L) to conduct an ontological analysis focused on a fundamental legal relation, namely, the power-subjection relation. We show that in certain cases, power-subjection relations are primitive, i.e., by means of institutional acts, other legal relations can be generated from them. Examples include relations of rights and duties, permissions and non-rights, liberties, secondary power-subjection, etc. As a contribution to the practice of conceptual modeling, and leveraging on the result of our analysis, we propose a conceptual modeling pattern, which is then applied to model a real-world case in tax law.