Knowledge Management for Legislative Drafting in an International Setting

Abstract

The processes of drafting consistent and coherent legislation and upholding and applying valid law are getting more and more complicated. In this paper we sketch the components of an integrated Knowledge Management architecture for Legislative Drafting and deployment of legislation in an international setting and discuss problems conceptual mismatches in legal vocabulary of competing legislative authorities. Such a support environment should at least provide the following functionalities: Management of references, version management, management of subsumption structures between concepts and norms, access to similar legal documents for `best practices', and access to guidelines or norms about drafting. We identify the key problem of managing a large and complicated repository of legislation as the problem of comparing (models of) legislation.