Tipping the scales: balancing principles
conference paper
The paper addresses the problem of making legal decisions about regulations such that they are compliant with legal principles. While decision-making using legal rules is well-developed in the literature, few researchers address reasoning with principles. A key difference between applying rules versus principles is that rules have a binary character, they are applied or not, while principles can be applied to a certain extent and in the case of conflicting principles, they require balancing instead of defeat. This paper provides a novel approach to balancing principles and deciding amongst regulations by proportional optimisation of values associated with regulations and principles. The approach can be generalised to other areas of decision-making.
TNO Identifier
1025418
ISSN
979-840071939-4
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Source title
20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, ICAIL 2025 - Proceedings of the Conference, 16-20 June 2025, Chicago, USA
Pages
258-267