Improving Legal Quality - an application report

Problems with legal quality will not only increase effort and costs of the law enforcement organisations, but also undermines the regulating power of the legislator. Unintended use or even abuse of the law may be the result. Governments therefore should improve their legal quality. The complexity of legislation however makes this task a hard one. The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA in Dutch: Belastingdienst) has developed a method and supporting tools that support a systematic translation of (new) legislation into the DTCA’s processes. This POWER-method and tools help to improve the quality of (new) legislation and codify the knowledge used in the translation processes in which legislation and regulations are transformed into procedures, computer programs and other designs. Thereby the time-to-market of the implementation of legislation will be reduced. In this article we explain some knowledge representation techniques that we use to improve legal quality. We will also s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICAIL
• Authors: Tom M. van Engers, Margherita R. Boekenoogen
• Keywords: Expert Knowledge, ICAIL 2003, Legal Quality, Legislation