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This article investigates the conceptual connection between argumentation and explanation in the law and provides a formal account of it. To do so, the methods used are conceptual analysis from legal theory and formal argumentation from AI. The contribution and results are twofold. On the one hand, we offer a critical reconstruction of the concept of legal argument, justification, and explanation of decision-making as it has been elaborated in legal theory and, above all, in AI and law. On the other hand, we propose some definitions of explanation in the context of formal legal argumentation, showing a connection between formal justification and explanation. We also investigate the notion of stable normative explanation developed elsewhere in Defeasible Logic and extend some complexity results. Our contribution is thus mainly conceptual, and it is meant to show how notions of explanation from literature on explainable AI and legal theory can be modeled in an argumentation framework with structured arguments.

The demand for creating increasingly dynamic, autonomous and proactive software systems is challenging for the traditional Multi-agent Systems (MASs) approaches. Such requirement has given rise to adaptive software agents approaches. At the same time, norm is an essential and challenging feature that still tends to be addressed in adaptive MAS. In fact, norms to regulate agent behavior is still a vague concept that has not been properly investigated in terms of modeling and implementation. Even though many researchers have proposed modeling languages to deal with different abstractions, these languages fail to support the modeling of abstractions, such as adaptation and norms. Even more severe is the fact that little has been done to support the systematic design of Adaptive Normative Multi-Agent Systems (ANMASs). To facilitate the design and development of ANMASs, this paper presents a new metamodel, as well as language support, as means to provide tools to enable software developers. The proposed metamodel fosters a better understanding of the way agents are able to change their behaviors to deal with norms and captures interactions between agent’s norms and adaptation. To this end, our research is organized into five steps: (i) a literature review to identify the limitations of existing approaches related to ANMAS modeling; (ii) propose a new metamodel to support adaptative and normative concepts; (iii) propose a new language for modeling ANMASs; (iv) perform a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the proposed language using a real case scenario, and (v) an empirical evaluation. The proposed metamodel and its associated modeling language advances the state of the art in modeling MASs and the approach is assessed in terms of correctness, time and difficulty. Our initial results revealed that our approach can be feasibly applied in a real world application, and is less difficult to apply and requires less time in comparison with a traditional approach. As software applications become more dynamic and adaptive, we believe it is essential to support developers to model MASs with abstractions such as adaptive agents, norms and their relationships. Such information can be foundational to steer future research on modeling adaptive agents capable of understanding and dealing with norms and adaptation.

This is the second part of a paper on the definition of judicial activism. The first discussed some theories on judicial activism and proposed a series of desiderata for a definition of judicial activism. This second part argues that defining judicial activism as the intentional modification of competence by the judge through his decisions follows the four identified desiderata and overcomes the criticisms made against previous theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Mining projects in northern Sweden causes 'open moments' of territorial uncertainty. • A multiplicity of actors produce narratives that define and make claims to space. • Narrating territory show how a multiplicity of actors territorializes space in everyday life. In the rural inland of northern Sweden, three mining projects are making the future of the land uncertain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we show how these potential mining interventions create 'open moments', turbulent events that destabilizes established claims to land. We analyse how actors such as reindeer herders, indigenous groups, local and national government and mining companies make claims to land, (i.e territorialising it) by drawing on discourses on environmental responsibility, sustainability, indigeneity or growth. By paying attention to language and knowledge production, we show how a multiplicity of actors narrate territory into being, allowing us to go beyond conventional notions of territory as produced 'from above' by the state or by counter-territorial movements 'from below'. By 'freezing time' in the unfolding of the open moments we lend all these 'territorial narratives' equal space, in order to analyse the connection between actors and their relation to land. This allow us to show connections between what might otherwise be perceived as locked and antagonistic positions, but also how ongoing processes of territorialisation are influenced by and change peoples' subject positions as the open moment unfolds on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to underscore the importance of studying indigenous law based on its own parameters. We discuss the results of a scholarly literature review regarding indigenous normative systems within the fields of anthropology and law. We conclude that to achieve real legal pluralism and recognize Mexico's pluriculturality in keeping with Article Two of its Constitution, it is necessary to study indigenous law based on its own parameters. Otherwise, any dialogue that claims to be intercultural would continue to reproduce the imposition of the hegemonic culture on the rest of the peoples that make up the Mexican nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a complex adaptive system, norms are widely used to regulate agents’ behavior within a society in which the agents are not explicitly given the norms of different host systems, but instead detect and adapt the norms autonomously. Thus, failing to adopt a host’s norms resulting in deprived of accessing resources and services that would severely affect their performance. Few attempts have been made to overcome this problem but proposed solutions lack accuracy in identifying the norms of a domain. Consequently, this paper demonstrates a new effective technique called Regulative Norms Detection Technique (RNDT) to detect norms by analyzing odd events that trigger reward or penalty. Several tests have been conducted on agents exploiting the technique to detect norms in a virtual domain under varying environmental settings. The tests’ results show that the RNDT achieve well although the rate of success relies on the environmental variables settings. Specifically, the result shows that the rate of adopting the domain’s norms using RNDT is 78.0%. The rate of rewarded agents in three testing cycles increased from 30% to 70%, the rate of neutral agents also increased from 35% to 45%. The most noticeable change is in the penalty case in which 35% of agents are penalized in cycle 1, while in cycle 2 and 3 the rate is maintained at 0.0%.

The LogiKEy workbench and dataset for ethical and legal reasoning is presented. This workbench simultaneously supports development, experimentation, assessment and deployment of formal logics and ethical and legal theories at different conceptual layers. More concretely, it comprises, in form of a dataset (Isabelle/HOL theory files), formal encodings of multiple deontic logics, logic combinations, deontic paradoxes and normative theories in the higher-order proof assistant system Isabelle/HOL. The data were acquired through application of the LogiKEy methodology, which supports experimentation with different normative theories, in different application scenarios, and which is not tied to specific logics or logic combinations. Our workbench consolidates related research contributions of the authors and it may serve as a starting point for further studies and experiments in flexible and expressive ethical and legal reasoning. It may also support hands-on teaching of non-trivial logic formalisms in lecture courses and tutorials.The LogiKEy methodology and framework is discussed in more detail in the companion research article titled “Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support” [5].

The current international approach to child marriage is the complete prohibition of marriage under the age of 18. Child marriage is considered a problem internationally, and those who practice it tend to be viewed as 'traditional', that is, insufficiently modern. This article aims to challenge this viewpoint, by discussing data that show that these young people use under-age marriage as a solution to navigate the modern world in which they live. As child marriage is rather a symptom of unplanned pregnancy outside of wedlock, the policies and programs should be redirected to address this root cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterogeneous community entails a number of social groups that adopt similar/different social norms. In such community, new individuals who join a new social group should be able to decide with which group they could assimilate based on their capabilities/values/manners. Otherwise, they would be penalized by other members in the group for violating some norms which they cannot comply. Using this approach, software agents would have better reasoning in simulating human society. In this paper, the authors propose a norms assimilation theory, in which a new agent attempts to assimilate with a social group's norms. This theory builds an approach to norm assimilation, analyzes the cases for an agent to decide to assimilate with a social group and develops a mathematical model to measure the assimilation cost and the agent's ability. The approach is developed based on the agent's internal belief about its ability and desire, and its external belief about the cost of assimilating with a number of social groups. The significance of this research is two-fold. Firstly, the study paves the way to future design of intelligent systems, i.e., software agents or robots, to closely mimic human social interactions. Secondly, the norm assimilation using agent-based system could be potentially utilized to simulate some social issues such as immigrants, new students, expatriate etc. The experiments that have been conducted demonstrate that an agent in the domain is able to calculate the assimilation cost and decide which social group to join. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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To resolve conflicts amongst norms, various non-monotonic formalisms can be used to perform prioritized normative reasoning. Meanwhile, formal argumentation provides a way to represent non-monotonic logics. In this paper we propose a representation of prioritized normative reasoning by argumentation. Using hierarchical abstract normative systems (HANS), we define three kinds of prioritized normative reasoning approaches called Greedy, Reduction and Optimization. Then, after formulating an argumentation theory for a HANS, we show that for a totally ordered HANS, Greedy and Reduction can be represented in argumentation by applying the weakest link and the last link principles, respectively, and Optimization can be represented by introducing additional defeats capturing the idea that for each argument that contains a norm not belonging to the maximal obeyable set then this argument should be rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]