The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration conducts a research program Program for an Ontology-based Working Environment for Rules and regulations (POWER). In this research program that was started in 1999 and is sponsored by the European Commission (E-POWER) since September 2001 an ICT-based methodology has been developed that enables the formalization of legal sources and finally the design of ...

Many Public Administrations (PA’s) use knowledge-based systems to support their legal decision making processes. The quality of the decisions made depends on the quality of the underlying knowledge. In the POWER research program (Program for an Ontology-based Working Environment for Rules and regulations) conducted by the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA in Dutch: Belastingdienst) ver...

The expansion of the US carceral state has been accompanied by the emergence of what we call the ‘shadow carceral state’. Operating beyond the confines of criminal law and justice institutions, the shadow carceral state expands penal power through institutional annexation and legal hybridity, including: (1) increased civil and administrative pathways to incarceration; (2) the creation of civil ...

The struggle for power has been a persistent phenomenon throughout history, involving the rulers, general public, and various other interest groups. As one of these groups, the legal community has been in a unique position to regulate the relationship between the ruler and the public because of its dual responsibilities to provide services to the public and to impose constraints on the rulers. ...

How does law affect the resilience of common-pool resources? To answer this question this paper adopts an institutionalist perspective on law, arguing that this shares many similarities with the approach of some legal pluralist scholars, i.e., the recognition that a social-ecological system is influenced by a plurality of legal orders having—to borrow Santos terminology—porous qualities. Studyi...

as a result of rule of law ideal, judges are required to act in accordance with laws. the ideal is justified by some political values: political liberty, legal liberty , personal liberty and equality. citizens are subject only to the law not to the arbitrary will or judgment of another who wields coercive government power. but in some cases law is indeterminate. in these cases there is an impor...