Legal Electronic Institutions and ONTOMEDIA: Dialogue, Inventio, and Relational Justice Scenarios

Since the seminal work by Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca, Toulmin, Ong, Giuliani and many others in late fifties and sixties, dialogue and argumentation have increasingly been at the center of philosophical discussions. Modelization of arguments and “argumentation schemes” constitute one of the main domains within the AI & Law field. The construction of Legal Electronic Institutions (LEI), and Ontomedia, an Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform in the context of the research carried out within the Catalan White Book on Mediation, has enhanced the discussion about fundamental issues on the theoretical approach taken in building such Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 tools. In this paper, I will address the question of how the content of ancient stasis, ekphrasis and inventio may be captured and reelaborated to define their theoretical backbones. I will call “relational justice” the conceptual legal framework in which Semantic Web strategies can be nested to offer a better user-centered service. Paraules clau: argumentation, dialogue, dialectic, rhetoric, Semantic Web, ODR, Electronic Legal Institutions, stasis, inventio, relational justice.