Jusletter IT

The representation of legal knowledge in legal informatics, besides the dimension of a language, deserves the methods of normative logic. This comprises normative notations and deontic logic. Such a core of a formal legal theory can be expanded with teleological structures. An early attempt to analyse legal teleological structures was Jhering’s Interessensprudenz. Contrary to action-oriented models (see Kelsen) we propose to supplement norms and even structural parts of a whole legal system with teleological relations. This will form a separate structural layer of legal knowledge representation. Such a layer can contribute to the metadata of legal documents. This is important in the search of legal documents and information retrieval. The teleological structure we propose contains three elements: first, the basic element A, second, the target element B, and, third, the teleological relation te. The proposed notation is A te B.