Beyond the Digital Judge: Legal Reasoning in Compliance Checking and Compliance Choices

[en] This paper investigates the practical reasoning involved in compliance-related decisions, distinguishing between two scenarios where a state of affairs is evaluated in the light of applicable norms: ex post compliance checking and ex ante compliance choices. While the literature in legal reasoning representation is exclusively focused on compliance checking scenarios, i.e., simulating a digital judge, different factors seem to play a role in the inner deliberation of compliance choices. In this paper we investigate how human agents are influenced in their compliance choices by their own value ranking and risk assessment and how, in turn, the choice affects their preference among alternative interpretations of the law. We contend that contributions from the literature such as the value-based argumentation framework, while focused on ex post judgments, may be able to provide a comprehensive framework for ex ante compliance decisions. The main goal of the research behind this work is to achieve a comprehensive representation of legal reasoning that can be used as a reference for the explanation of automated compliance decisions.

Research center :

Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) > SVV - Software Verification and Validation

Disciplines :

Computer science
Law, criminology & political science: Multidisciplinary, general & others

Author, co-author :

CECI, Marcello ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SVV

BIANCULLI, Domenico ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SVV

External co-authors :

Language :

English

Title :

Beyond the Digital Judge: Legal Reasoning in Compliance Checking and Compliance Choices

Publication date :

2025

Event name :

DIGIHUM 2025

Event place :

Wien, Austria

Event date :

20-21.11.2025

Audience :

International

Main work title :

Digital Humanism. DIGHUM 2025

Publisher :

Springer, Berlin, Germany

ISBN/EAN :

978-3-032-11108-1

Pages :

137-152

Peer reviewed :

Peer reviewed

Focus Area :

Security, Reliability and Trust

Name of the research project :

U-AGR-7492 - C24/IS/18894115/AGLAIA - CECI Marcello

Funders :

FNR - Fonds National de la Recherche

Funding number :

C24/IS/18894115/AGLAIA

Funding text :

This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), under grant number C24/IS/18894115/AGLAIA.

Available on ORBilu :

since 01 October 2025

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