THE MOTIVATION OF THE PROJECT
Challenges and opportunities
The project ONE-LEX is intended to provide a response to some very important trends in the provision of legal information, which determine serious problems but also open enormous opportunities for the European legal systems.
  1. Legal information is digitalised.
    The first, and most basic trend, is the rapidly progressing digitalization of legal information. An always larger set of law texts and data are available in electronic formats: legislation, regulations, administrative decisions, case law, contracts, fiscal data, files concerning court proceedings, and so on. The push towards digitalisation is favoured by the integration between the computer-supported drafting of documents and their electronic distribution, and also by the availability of reliable technologies for ensuring authenticity and integrity of electronic documents (like electronic signatures). Electronic legal documents rather than being a copy of pre-existing original paper documents tend to become the official legal texts. The production of private contracts and administrative acts in electronic formats, to be preserved in computerised databases, is today common in most European jurisdictions. This trend is being encouraged by the expansion of e-commerce and e-government: as exchange agreements are being concluded over telecommunication networks, such agreements will be in electronic format, and so will be administrative decisions which result from electronic interactions between offices, and between offices and citizens. A recent development of e-government, having major impacts on the law. is represented by the on-line process (or telematic process) that is by the enablement of two way document interchange and application interoperability between all the Courts' internal users (clerks, judges, etc.). and all their external users (lawyers, expert witnesses, etc.), When this idea will be fully implemented, all judicial decisions, in all degrees of jurisdiction, will be in electronic form, and so will be all acts by the parties, the files of each process, the records of the proceedings, all data kept by the clerk's offices. Finally, there are a few experiences concerning electronic promulgation of law text, so that even the original statutory instruments are going to be electronic files, authenticated by an electronic signature of the competent authority (the Head of State, in Italy).
  2. The law moves into the Internet.
    The second trend, which is synergetic to the first one, consists in the law moving into the Internet. Digitalised legal information, being freed from its traditional paper hardware, can be processed by computer, and transmitted over computer networks: it can inhabit the expanding virtual word of the so-called cyberspace. The Internet already contains many legal sources, and already is, in many domains, the main source of legal information for lawyers and citizens: one can find over the word-wide-web many statutory texts, a vast amount of case law, and also many comments on laws and cases (there is an emerging vast amount of digitalised legal doctrine): it is becoming not only a huge repository of legal information, but also the open forum where legal issues are debated. The Internet (in combination with computer nets which are internal to public administrations), moreover, is the place where legally relevant information is exchanged, and where, as a result of such exchanges, legally binding texts are produced. As legally relevant procedures are taking place through communication exchanges over Internet (or Intranets)---procedures for the production of administrative acts, in the framework of e-government; procedures for the judicial decision of litigations, in the framework of the on-line process, and so on)---the legal relevance of the cyberspace changes: not only the Internet is the place where one can find information about what legal events are happening in the real word, but it has become a significant component of the legal word, in which many legal event are primarily taking place.
  3. Formats for legal information are standardized.
    The third trend, which is dependent on the two previous ones, concerns standardisation of formats for the representation of textual legal information. As everybody knows, the strength of the Internet is its inclusiveness and openness: one accesses whatever information is available, and one provides (within general legal constrains) whatever information one can upload to a connected computer. For the network to grow, a central authority is not required: what information is accessed results, in principle, from the decentralised decisions of users and providers. However, in order that information can be accessed and appropriately processed by the decentralised users, it is necessary that it is coded and decoded according to shared machine-readable standards or protocols. Standards can concern different aspects of legal information, at different levels: the communication protocols that are required for information to be made accessible over the web; the ways of specifying the typographical appearance of the documents; the links to other documents; the structure of the documents (their division in component units, like sections and subsections); and so on. The determination of machine-processable standards is a crucial issue for public policy in the information society. On the one hand standardisation involves some dangers: (a) standards, once they are established tend to spread regardless of their merit since the need to participate in communication pushes everyone towards the currently adopted standards; (b) privately determined standards, or the related algorithms, can be disclosed to others only under specific conditions or can even be the object of intellectual property so that competition can be hindered; (c) the need to respect standards may limit innovation and diversity. On the other hand the shared adoption of appropriate open standard greatly facilitates technological progress, cooperation and competition in the framework of the knowledge society.
  4. The Internet moves toward the semantic-web.
    The fourth trend is the move from the present, text-based web, into the so-called semantic-web. This means that legal information available over the Internet is increasingly processed according to its content (or meaning), and not only as a pure text (as a sequence of word, to be read by a human). This result is usually achieved by embedding in the natural language text special computer readable specifications, which can be processed in various ways: for retrieving the document, for accessing related information, for determining its currently binding content, for applying the rules it includes, and so on (XML tagging is normally used to include such meta-textual information in legal documents, supplemented with languages like OWL for specifying conceptual structures, and logical extensions like in RULE-XML for capturing the logical structures of legal rules). Standards for marking derogations and modifications in legal documents are already being devised, which allow the legal text currently in force to be automatically constructed. Further meta-information is being embedded in legal texts available through the Internet for the purpose of conceptual information retrieval. In particular, documents are indexed according to conceptual analyses (ontologies) of the concerned legal domains.
  5. Legal regulations become executable.
    The fifth trend, just at its beginning, concerns the executable representation of legal regulations. This means that computer systems not only help humans in accessing legal texts, but directly apply the legal regulations which are embedded in (or linked to) such texts, or support humans in applying this task. This is happening in two areas. Firstly, advanced systems are being developed for automatic contracting, within e-commerce. These systems establish the content of binding contracts for the delivery of goods and services, according to the agreed result of individual negotiation (this happens in particular in digital-rights-management environments). For such systems to be able to interact meaningfully and correctly both with humans and with other similar systems, it is necessary that they share the same way of representing normative positions (rights and duties) and other legal qualifications. Secondly, some large-scale rule-based systems have been developed for public administration. Such systems assist employees and citizens in applying legal rules, by performing automatically the corresponding inferences (determining taxes, assessing entitlements, and so on). Both systems for automatic contracting and rule-based systems for public administrations provide proprietary languages for representing normative information, usually not translatable one into the other. The use of such languages (without their interoperability being ensured and a shared standard being available) may hinder the development of new application, prevent communication between different systems, and in general reduce competition.
  6. Legal information is provided in diverse ways.
    The sixth trend is the increasing diversity in the provision of legal information. In Europe we have seen at first, in the 70's, the emergence of national public systems for the on-line provision of legal information. Then, in the 80's we have witnessed the crisis of such systems (with a few exceptions), and the increasing provision of electronic legal information by private publishers (using cd's for distribution). In the 90's public providers have come back, exploiting the fact that law text are available to them in digital format (since they are typeset though computer systems), and that the Internet allows such texts to be distributed at low cost. At the same time, thanks to the Internet, a number of new actors have emerged in the provision of legal information: legal information institutes, educational institutions, professional associations, law firms, and others are providing large amount of freely-accessible on-line legal information (there are even portals which have the specific purpose of providing access to on-line legal resources). There is the need to define a new framework for the provision of legal information, which ensures that different information needs (of citizens, public authorities, and professional lawyers) can be satisfied in the best way, through the cooperation and competition of different providers. In particular, it is urgent to redefine the tasks of public authorities, namely the way in which they should accomplish their duty to ensure knowledge of the law in this complex multi-actor environment (for instance, it has been argued that such authorities do not fulfil their duty by only providing raw texts; they must also structure such texts and enrich them with machine readable meta-textual information, according to the best available standards).
  7. Legal theory and legal informatics are integrated.
    The seventh trend is the two-ways integration of legal theory and in legal informatics. On the one hand results provided by legal theory --- with regard to aspects such as legal logic, the theory of norms and normative positions, models of legal reasoning --- are translated into computable models. On the other hand legal informatics is providing new models of legal reasoning to legal theory, taking into account the achievements in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. By integrating these two domains of research it is possible to achieve different valuable results: a better understanding of the law, a better specification for legal information systems, a critical approach to their application, the identification of new ways of processing legal information. The contribution of legal theory is particularly important with regard to standards for legal information, which need to corresponds to the nature of the law, its social functions, and the needs of institutions and citizen, and thus appear rational and acceptable to both the providers and the receivers of legal information.
  8. The EU includes new countries.
    Finally, the last trend we want to mention is the extension of European Union to new countries, having very different legal and technologies histories. Legal integration and cooperation needs to be based first of all on mutual knowledge, which nowadays requires the support of information and communication technologies. However, for communication technologies to enable sharing legal information it is necessary on the one hand that such information is retrieved and processed according to the best available technologies, and on the other hand that legal information is stored and communicated according to agreed-upon standards.

    The scenario just described is characterised by great challenges and great opportunities: an appropriate provision of digital legal information, based upon principled shared standards, can greatly contribute to the what we called informational legal unification of Europe. This is exactly the time when the studies and proposal on legal standardisation at the European level can be most useful: the first standards are now being decided upon at the national level, considerable amounts of legal information are being formatted according to such standards and made accessible over the Internet; new countries as starting to develop up-to-date approaches to legal information. Knowledge of the issues involved in standardisation, awareness of best technological solutions and practices, proposals for improvements, suggestions for convergence and interoperability can be very useful for European policy-makers, National authorities and all private and public providers of legal information.