Legal Informatics in Italy
Fifty years of studies, research and experiences
edited by: Ginevra Peruginelli and Mario Ragona
Abstracts. Preface.
A “giusliberista”, democratic and philosophical computer science (p. 13)
by Luigi Lombardi Vallauri
In my 1969-1995 writings on legal informatics, that this contribution diachronically marks, three intersecting themes are represented: the Freirecht (“giusliberismo”), the critical reductionism, democracy as an essential value of legal informatics. Among the technical corollaries of Freirecht, the following are evidenced: the need for “free-law” programs due to the inevitable choice to be made among the logically and legally possible solutions within the applicable valid law;
highly problematic programs due, on one side to the cultural hegemony of the axiological noncognitivism, on the other to the need (admitted even by critical reductionism) for evidential conscious experiences, so far inaccessible to computation. Among the technical corollaries of democracy: the primacy of the so far very neglected expert systems over information storage and retrieval, but also need for synergy and mutual control in integrated systems; databases including newspaper publishing; retrieval of documents starting from life situations; open competition between electronic systems and human jurists.
The intersection of the three themes finds its higher level of processing in the form-system, designed in 1975 as SIGN (Sistema di Informazione Giuridica Nazionale – National Legal Information System), with its extensive network of terminals assisted by “municipal lawyers” freely available throughout the territory, later evolved in 1995 as SEGG (Sistema Esperto Giuridico Globale – Global Legal Expert System), informonstrum comprehensive of the automatic legislator program.
The text ends by mentioning the competition raised between legal informatics and mediation, the first one de-humanizing, the other de-juridificating, both paradoxically converging in dismissing the human jurist, while inviting to foster roboethics, as a philosophical premise to computer law in the context of a more and more artificialized world.
Download/View PDF HERE.
Original source here.