Legal Patterns for Different Constitutive Rules

Abstract

The research for solutions for compliance is mainly focused on the representation of regulative rules, i.e. the imperatives that the industry is asked to comply to. Yet, a relevant part of the legal knowledge contained in regulation cannot be expressed in terms of deontic statements, and is instead represented as constitutive rules. This concept was first introduced by philosophers of language such as J.L. Austin and J.R. Searle and further developed in legal philosophy, where constitutive statements are classified in categories according to their legal effects. The present paper presents a heuristic approach for the representation of alethic statements as part of a methodology aimed at ensuring effective translation of the regulatory text into a machine-readable language. The approach is based on a classification of constitutive statements contained in the work of legal philosophers A.G. Conte and G. Carcaterra. The methodology includes an intermediate language, accompanied by an XML persistence model, and introduces a set of “legal concept patterns” to specifically represent the different constitutive statements. The paper identifies five patterns for the corresponding constitutive statements found in financial regulations: legal definitions, commencement rules, amendments, relative necessities, and party to the law statements.