The Deep Structure of Law

This article discusses theoretical research on abstraction methods that describe the contents of laws at an abstract level above the code. Abstractions are useful for several purposes, for instance to determine the normative essence of an existing law, which is interesting from the viewpoint of legal theory. In legislative drafting deep structures are intermediate formalizations between the normative intentions of the lawgivers and the possible ways to codify the intentions. A tentative framework is given for the construction of deep structures out of structural elements, and for the generation of diierent legislative paraphrases with identical normative eeects. We can use deep structures in legislative drafting as a formalization and modelling step between the phase in which global normative requirements are formulated for behaviour which is to be regulated, and the phase in which codiication takes place.