Logic Oriented Methods for Structuring in the Context of Lawmaking

A distinction between legislative texts and legal texts lies in open formulations. Legislative texts allow alternative formulations. In contrast, the wording of a valid legal text is fixed. The sole variation of a legal text is its interpretation. At a decision-making point in a legislative process the interpretation is basically open. However, it can be pushed in a certain direction with the help of additional materials, such as parliamentary reports. With the transition from a text culture to a machine culture, the language changes, too. The language of the machine culture is the formal logic that is adequate for the machine, but not in the same way for people in their everyday language usage. In the mainstream of greater rationalisation, logic is increasingly used in legislation, especially allowing only correct interpretations. However, logic is not the only instrument which can be used to shape and improve legislative rationality. In the neighbourhood of logic there are further methods which can find application in structuring legislative texts. We propose to supplement legislative documents ex ante with explicit logicoriented information which is relevant to ontologies, thesauruses and taxonomies. This information in a form of a mini-thesaurus can already be used in ex ante legislative procedure, and should not be added only in the ex post analysis of legal documentation. The proposed method can be assigned to structural visualisation. In the end, the paper examines variations of sequential legal visualisation (SLV) – dynamic SLV and static SLV. Their specific feature is the visualisation of the legal meaning.