Computable Models of the Law -- Computable Models of the Law and ICT: State of the Art and Trends in European Research -- I Knowledge Representation, Ontologies and XML Legislative Drafting -- MetaLex XML and the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format -- MetaVex: Regulation Drafting Meets the Semantic Web -- Building Semantic Resources for Legislative Drafting: The DALOS Project -- II Knowledge Representation, Legal Ontologies and Information Retrieval -- Moving in the Time: An Ontology for Identifying Legal Resources -- An Ontology for Spatial Regulations -- Supporting the Construction of Spanish Legal Ontologies with Text2Onto -- Dynamic Aspects of OPJK Legal Ontology -- Improvements in Recall and Precision in Wolters Kluwer Spain Legal Search Engine -- III Argumentation and Legal Reasoning -- Three Senses of "Argument" -- Constructing Legal Arguments with Rules in the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF) -- Assumption-Based Argumentation for Epistemic and Practical Reasoning -- Computing Argumentation for Decision Making in Legal Disputes -- Deterrence and Defeasibility in Argumentation Process for ALIS Project -- Temporal Deontic Defeasible Logic: An Analytical Approach -- Rulebase Technology and Legal Knowledge Representation -- IV Normative and Multi-agent Systems -- Source Norms and Self-regulated Institutions -- Distributed Norm Enforcement: Ostracism in Open Multi-Agent Systems -- V Online Dispute Resolution -- Retrieval of Case Law to Provide Layman with Information about Liability: Preliminary Results of the BEST-Project -- ICT-Supported Dispute Resolution -- Concepts and Fields of Relational Justice.

Information technology has now pervaded the legal sector, and the very modern concepts of e-law and e-justice show that automation processes are ubiquitous. European policies on transparency and information society, in particular, require the use of technology and its steady improvement. Some of the revised papers presented in this book originate from a workshop held at the European University Institute of Florence, Italy, in December 2006. The workshop was devoted to the discussion of the different ways of understanding and explaining contemporary law, for the purpose of building computable models of it -- especially models enabling the development of computer applications for the legal domain. During the course of the following year, several new contributions, provided by a number of ongoing (or recently finished) European projects on computation and law, were received, discussed and reviewed to complete the survey. This book presents 20 thoroughly refereed revised papers on the hot topics under research in different EU projects: legislative XML, legal ontologies, semantic web, search and meta-search engines, web services, system architecture, dialectic systems, dialogue games, multi-agent systems (MAS), legal argumentation, legal reasoning, e-justice, and online dispute resolution. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation, ontologies and XML legislative drafting; knowledge representation, legal ontologies and information retrieval; argumentation and legal reasoning; normative and multi-agent systems; and online dispute resolution.