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Research project

CompuLaw - Computable Law

CompuLaw addresses the regulation of computations (processes and systems) through an innovative legal and technological framework: it provides epistemic, technical, and normative guidance for the development of computable laws and law compliant computations.

This project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC)

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 833647)

There is an ongoing transformation of the social world into a hybrid infosphere, populated by a huge and growing number of increasingly pervasive, autonomous and intelligent computational entities. The scale, speed, ubiquity, and autonomy of computations make it impossible for humans to directly monitor them and anticipate all possible illegal computational behaviours. The law can hold the hybrid infosphere under its rule – providing protection, security and trust – only if it be-comes computation-oriented: legal and ethical requirements must be integrated with, mapped onto, and partially translated into, computable representations of legal knowledge and reasoning. Current legal culture still has not adequately addressed risks and potentials of computable law.

This project will fill this gap, providing concepts, principles, methods and techniques, and normative guidelines to support law-abiding computations. It has the normative purpose of upholding the principle of rule of law, translating legal norms and legal values into requirements for computable laws and legally-responsive computational agents. Finally, it aims to provide major methodological and substantive breakthroughs.

On one end, CompuLaw proposes a socio-technical methodology for regulatory design and evaluation, integrating three disciplinary clusters: a social-legal one, a philosophical-logical one and a computing-AI one. On the other, it develops a framework including: (a) norms, legal values and principles for developers, deployers, and users; (b) languages and methods to specify requirements of computations and norms directed to them; (c) cognitive architectures for legally-responsive computational agents

This ERC project is hosted at the University of Bologna.

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External Partners

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