With academic qualifications in computer science, statistics and law, Leo Reisinger was a recognised expert on the new issues arising from the increasing use of electronic data processing in the 1970s.

Technological developments in electronic data processing during the 1970s also prompted consideration of how these changes should be addressed. Discussion focused on the potential use of computers in various areas of public administration and on the role of computers in the legislative process. Even at that time, issues such as data storage and retrieval, documentation, formalisation, decision-making and data protection were already being examined.

This text is a transcript of a short lecture given by Gerhart Bruckmann at the memorial event for Leo Reisinger on 1st of February 2024. Bruckmann recalled the reservations that had existed at the time about legal informatics in connection with Leo Reisinger’s habilitation at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Vienna in 1973.

Legistics concerns the linguistic and systematic design of legislation. Drawing on the EDP pilot project on constitutional law, Leo Reisinger and Friedrich Lachmayer developed a structural approach to legistics from the perspectives of legal theory and legal informatics. Through the use of formalisation, structural legistics goes beyond traditional legislative drafting techniques. Today, the Anglo-American concept of the Rule of Law largely converges with the principle of the Rechtsstaat in the Western continental European constitutional tradition. The Rule of Law exists both as a political and as a legal concept, and in both a »thin« version, focused on legal certainty, and a »thick« version, appropriate to constitutional democracy. The thin version displays a certain degree of convergence with the rules and principles of legistics, a relationship that can be described within the framework of general legal theory. The thick version goes beyond this, particularly as a result of its judicial dimension. At the level of the thin version, it is also possible to identify a substantive convergence between technically oriented legistics and a philosophy of law concerned with defining the concept of law, as well as a degree of substantive overlap between natural-law and legal-positivist thought. These points of convergence can be situated within a structural theory of law.

This article discusses Leo Reisinger’s pioneering approaches to deontic logic and the theory of normative systems in the context of the conception of law as a structural science developed by Reisinger and Friedrich Lachmayer, drawing on the work of Jürgen von Kempski. In his groundbreaking work on the theoretical foundations of legal informatics, Reisinger sought to conceptualise law as a structural science and to integrate concepts from fuzzy set theory in order to model legal concepts and support legal decision-making. Combining scholarly rigour with an application-oriented engineering mindset, Reisinger developed a practice-focused model based on mathematical and logical methods. His forward-looking approaches established a theoretical foundation that remains highly relevant in the context of modern developments in artificial intelligence and, in many respects, is more topical than ever.

Through his interdisciplinary approach, Leo Reisinger brought together legislative theory and legal informatics. Particularly noteworthy in this context was his joint attempt with Friedrich Lachmayer to develop a computer-assisted method for analysing the structure of legislation. Of particular significance were his proposals to use decision tables and flowcharts to reconstruct normative texts and thereby assess their consistency and completeness; to represent general norms as fuzzy algorithms by drawing on fuzzy set theory; and to employ simulation methods in the legislative process. To support legislative work, Leo Reisinger developed the concept of a computer-assisted »Legistics Information and Planning System«.

Leo Reisinger was a pioneer in the German-speaking world of what was then the emerging discipline of legal informatics. He understood it »as the intersection of legal studies, formal sciences and information sciences«. The term »legal informatics« appears in the titles of two of his books, published ten years apart. Drawing on these publications, this article examines Reisinger’s understanding of the discipline.

This article pays tribute to Leo Reisinger as a pioneer of European legal informatics and situates his work within the epistemological paradigm of »converging options«. Reisinger’s interdisciplinary approach, particularly his fascination with formalisation and structural analysis, is examined in the context of interactions between theology and the social sciences. The article also highlights the extent to which his early death curtailed the further development of the theoretical foundations of legal informatics. It argues for a revival of the discipline in the age of artificial intelligence and digitalisation, in the spirit of Reisinger.

Leo Reisinger spent most of his academic career at the Institute of Statistics at the University of Vienna. There, he came into contact at an early stage with computer applications in business and public administration. Owing to the exceptional breadth of his expertise, he was not only active in research on legal informatics but also played a key role, together with Professor Gerhart Bruckmann, in establishing the degree programme in business informatics.

This article examines the impact of digital transformation on legal informatics. Looking back at Leo Reisinger’s 1977 monograph on legal informatics, it shows that the discipline’s original axioms and subject areas have largely been borne out. At the same time, however, advances in technology and in the ways technology is used call for additional perspectives. The original expectations placed on the formal sciences have been fulfilled only in part and today play a marginal role. Legal informatics currently focuses largely on commenting on regulation and examining popular digital topics, while paying comparatively little attention to substantial aspects of the digital transformation currently under way. The article therefore emphasises the need for transdisciplinary research and for a stronger integration of the social sciences into legal informatics. It argues that greater attention should be paid to design science and empirical research in order to develop a legislative practice that is better informed by both technological and organisational considerations. The article concludes with an outlook on future challenges and areas of inquiry for legal informatics.

Leo Reisinger was a pioneering thinker in the field of legal informatics who recognised as early as the 1970s the importance of linking legal scholarship with computer science. In his work, he emphasised the need to support legal practice through the use of information systems, particularly with regard to the automation of legal decision-making. Reisinger’s concepts, such as the »algorithmisation of legal decisions«, are especially relevant today, as they anticipated many of the tensions that now play a central role in the moderation of content on online platforms under regulatory frameworks such as the Digital Services Act. This article examines Reisinger’s contributions and explores how his visionary ideas can be applied to the challenges of content moderation in digital socio-technical systems.

With academic qualifications in computer science, statistics and law, Leo Reisinger was a recognised expert on the emerging issues of the 1970s.

This article is based on the lecture »Erstarrung und Veränderung. Abjektivität, Feti-Sets und das I-Ging«, which I delivered on 1 February 2024 at the memorial event in honour of Dr Dr Leo Reisinger, organised by the University of Vienna’s postgraduate programme in Information and Media Law.

Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence offer numerous opportunities for the fields of legal informatics and business informatics. At the same time, they also present challenges, particularly in teaching and in the acquisition of fundamental methods. This article provides a brief explanation of generative artificial intelligence and outlines its significance for legal informatics and business informatics.

Leo Reisinger defined »legal informatics not as a specialised discipline of legal scholarship, but as the intersection of legal studies, formal sciences and information sciences«. Alongside the development of legal information systems, he regarded the algorithmisation of legal decisions as a central subject of the discipline. The significance of this area of legal informatics has increased in recent years as a result of technological advances in artificial intelligence and, in particular, the availability of generative large language model (LLM) systems. Proponents of the idea of an AI-based legal order are now seeking to establish a new form of law. Following the concept of the »legal singularity«, machines are envisaged as eliminating all legal indeterminacy and uncertainty, as well as the separation of powers. Such ideas demonstrate that the scholarly examination of current technological developments at the intersection of law and computer science requires both critical distance and a sound understanding of, and expertise in, both disciplines. Reisinger’s conception of legal informatics as an independent specialised discipline, belonging neither to legal studies nor to computer science, thus appears more modern and forward-looking than ever.

This article analyses the development and current applications of generative artificial intelligence in the legal field. Since the emergence of ChatGPT in 2021, developments in artificial intelligence have gained unprecedented momentum. The article examines the strategic implications of this technology for the legal professions, identifies specific use cases and discusses their practical implementation. Particular attention is paid to the use of large language models (LLMs) in the day-to-day work of legal professionals, the development of AI agents, and future challenges relating to data sovereignty, pricing models and technical infrastructure. The article emphasises the need for the responsible use of these technologies and underlines that AI should be conceived as a tool to support human expertise rather than replace it.

This article examines Leo Reisinger’s early concepts for the automated analysis of legal norms in legal informatics and their significance for modern developments in artificial intelligence. Drawing on the author’s research and practical experience during work on his doctoral dissertation between 1988 and 1990, it traces the historical development of decision tables and functional dependencies in legal informatics. The article discusses how Reisinger’s methods helped shape the early development of digital legal informatics and highlights their connections with today’s AI-based systems such as ChatGPT. By comparing these early approaches with current technologies, it analyses both the potential and the challenges and limitations of intelligent systems in the legal context.

Leo Reisinger, a legal informatics scholar whose life and work were cut short by an accident in the mid-1980s, would no doubt have taken great interest in the state of technology forty years later. Technological development over this period has been enormous: during Reisinger’s lifetime, there were neither high-performance computers in the form of everyday personal computers, nor laptops or smartphones, let alone the internet, which has since become an indispensable part of daily life. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now widely regarded as the »next level«. Visions of its use in the justice system extend as far as computer-based adjudication. Using contentious civil proceedings as an example, this article outlines the extent to which, in the author’s view, such a future scenario is subject not only to technical limitations but also to legal constraints.

The typewriter was first mass-produced and sold in 1873. It was not until the 1920s that, in the notarial context, a typewritten document came to be recognised as equivalent to a handwritten one. The pressure to innovate created by digitalisation does not allow for such a leisurely period of adaptation, posing particular challenges for public administration, which is conservative in the literal sense of the word. One possible approach is to apply marketing methods developed in the private sector. Using BTX as an Example illustrates the problems that may arise in doing so.

The use of technology has been transforming processes within the Austrian justice system for more than forty years. Looking at the legal sector as a whole, clear parallels can also be identified in the corresponding stages of evolution in Legal Tech. Through its strategic »Justiz 3.0« initiative, the Federal Ministry of Justice has, since 2013 and in close cooperation with practitioners, been working towards fully digital workflows and the IT workstations required to support them. This article provides an overview of the current state of digitalisation in the justice system, offers an outlook on future developments and explains the strategic considerations underlying these efforts.

With academic qualifications in computer science, statistics and law, Leo Reisinger was a recognised expert on the emerging issues of the 1970s. His influence was not confined to theory. Over the subsequent decades, his work became an important foundation for the representation and documentation of legal provisions. Many of the methods used today to document the law in Austrian legal databases can be traced back, to a significant extent, to Reisinger’s work. Public legal information systems, legal publishers and the legal advisory professions all owe much to his pioneering contributions.

Anyone engaging with legal informatics today cannot dispense with an understanding of the developments of the 1970s. One of the pioneers of that period was Leo Reisinger. His work helps to shed light on the significance of the human right to data protection and on its contemporary evolution in an increasingly digitalised environment. The aim is to sharpen awareness of the indispensable role of data protection legislation in conjunction with the freedoms of expression and thought, while also exposing emerging AI-based tendencies towards surveillance and intrusive data analysis. Ultimately, this means recognising that individual freedom also depends on protecting the freedom of others and on preserving a liberal state governed by the rule of law and democratic principles in the digital age.