A considerable number of books and papers have analyzed normative concepts using new techniques developed by logicians; however, few have bridged the gap between the English legal culture and the Continental (i.e. European and Latin American) tradition in legal philosophy. This book addresses this issue by offering an introductory study on the many possibilities that logical analysis offers the study of legal systems. The volume is divided into two sections: the first covers the basic aspects of classical and deontic logic and its connections, advancing an explanation of the most important topics of the discipline by comparing different systems of deontic logic and exploring some of the most important paradoxes in its domain. The second section deals with the role of logic in the analysis of legal systems by discussing in what sense deontic logic and the logic of norm-propositions are useful tools for a proper understanding of the systematic structure of law.

"Logic and law have a long history in common, but the influence has been mostly one-sided, except perhaps in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., where disputes at the market place or in tribunals in Greece seem to have stimulated a lot of reflection among sophistic philosophers on such topics as language and truth. Most of the time it was logic that influenced legal thinking, but in the last 50 years logicians began to be interested in normative concepts and hence in law"--

This book describes extensions of deontic logic. Deontic logic is a branch of philosophical logic involving reasoning with norms, obligations, prohibitions and permissions. The extensions concern the logical structure of legal rules and legal reasoning. Their function is to improve the representation of legal knowledge and enhance deontic logic through increased expressibility. The resulting formulas acquire new meanings, not expressible in standard deontic logic, which are subject to fresh interpretations. The author offers an extensive analysis of the representation of actors, to whom the norms are directed, and authorities who enact the norms. Moreover, a distinction is made between enactment and applicability. A modality of enactment can be used to express inconsistent enacted norms in a consistent way. An authority-hierarchy is introduced to filter out the applicable norms from the set of enacted norms. Some related philosophical questions will be discussed regarding the applications of formalisms that are intrinsic to practical science with respect to `consistency' and `universality'. The formalisms and applications considered here are relevant for law, philosophy and computer science, with a special focus on the improvement of legal expert systems and intelligent support for legal professionals.

The Handbook of Deontic Logic and Normative Systems presents a detailed overview of the main lines of research on contemporary deontic logic and related topics. Although building on decades of previous work in the field, it is the first collection to take into account the significant changes in the landscape of deontic logic that have occurred in the past twenty years. These changes have resulted largely, though not entirely, from the interaction of deontic logic with a variety of other fields, including computer science, legal theory, organizational theory, economics, and linguistics. This first volume of the Handbook is divided into three parts, containing nine chapters in all, each written by leading experts in the field. The first part concentrates on historical foundations. The second examines topics of central interest in contemporary deontic logic. The third presents some new logical frameworks that have now become part of the mainstream literature. A second volume of the Handbook is currently in preparation, and there may be a third after that.

These 13 papers collected from several meetings of the Society for Exact Philosophy from 1993-96 take a variety of approaches to the task of integrating normative and defeasible reasoning. While most of the papers propose some version of defeasible deontic logic, a few consider alternatives approaches to solving some of the puzzles of normative reasoning that deontic reasoning has failed to resolve. The authors also describe standard deontic logic. Name index only. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A useful logic in which to specify normative system behaviour, deontic logic has a broad spectrum of possible applications within the field: from legal expert systems to natural language processing, database integrity to electronic contracting and the specification of fault-tolerant software.

The present study which I have subtitled A Study in Law and Logic was prompted by the question of whether an investigation into law and legal systems could lead to the discovery of unrevealed fundamental patterns common to all such systems. This question was further stimulated by two interrelated problems. Firstly, could an inquiry be rooted in specifically legal matters, as distinct from the more usual writings on deontic logic? Secondly, could such inquiry yield a theory which would nevertheless embrace a strict and simple logical structure, permitting substantive conclusions in legal matters to be deduced from simple rules governing some basic concepts? Before the development of deontic logic, W. N. Hohfeld devoted his efforts to this question at the beginning of this century. However, with this exception, few jurists have studied the interrelation between law and logic projected in this way. Nevertheless, two great names are to be found, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Jeremy Bentham-both philo sophers with legal as weIl as logical training. Bentham's investigations of logical patterns in law have only recently attracted attention; and as for Leibniz, his achievements are still almost totally unexplored (his most important writings on law and logic have not even been translated from Latin). My initial interest in the question was evoked by Professor Stig Kanger. Although primarily a logician and philosopher, Stig Kanger has been interested also in the fundamentals of legal theory.