Logic and Law

In the past 30 years, major evolutionary changes in logic have taken place. Whereas in the first half of the last century logic was mainly applied to mathematics and philosophy, the rise of computer science, artificial intelligence, computational and logical linguistics, logic in engineering, etc, gave logic a big push and accelerated its evolutionary development.

This area comprises the influence and potential significant interaction of the developments in the other areas of the network on the area of logic and law. If we look more closely at the way logic has evolved in response to the needs of computer science, AI and language, we will see that these areas have to do with daily human behaviour, reasoning and actions and that they deal with devices and artifacts that help and or replace the human in his daily activities.

Logic is needed partly as the underlying formal language and partly to model and analyse the human in his daily activities in order to help build better devices to serve, regulate or understand him. Once logic has evolved in this direction and new logical tools have been developed for this purpose, the same kind of new logics and new tools can help the area of law. Law also deals with humans in their daily activities. Many areas in law require similar additional logical tools as those already available.

Here lies the connection between logic and law. We can say without serious exaggeration that the area of logic and law is going to be central to the further advancement of logic in the next twenty years.

This web site contains useful resources for the development of this area.

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