An Evaluation of Methodologies for Legal Formalization

Legal formalization is a necessary step for automated legal reasoning because it aims to capture the meaning of legal texts in a machine-readable form. Therefore, there are many attempts to create better legal formalization methods and to make legal reasoning techniques more efficient. However, these methods are rarely evaluated and thus, it is difficult to recognize the“good” legal formalization method. In this article, the authors provide a categorization of necessary properties of a “good” formalization that is based on a literature review of recent state-of-the-art methods. They conclude in favour of the legal experts’ evaluation method as the most suitable one for assessing the quality of legal formalization.