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law/the Dutch civil code, backing several buyer/seller
scenarios.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER
DEVELOPMENTS
The intent underlying our research is to (re)connect
normative (including legal) reasoning with other
forms of reasoning. Particularly, we are interested in
the role that (legal) norms play in social structures and
how norms influence human behavior in those struc-
tures.
In the current approach, typical strategy decision
problems for a given game do not take explicitly into
account the possibility of the player to behave avoid-
ing a rule, or forcing the interpretation of the rule to-
ward its interest, if the regulator (consciously or not)
left some ambiguity. The second case is not so com-
mon in games, but in the case of legal order, lacunae
of law are practically unavoidable and within limits,
desirable. This is part in fact of the human collec-
tive adaptation and social reasoning capabilities. In
that way, humans question rules, both directly or in
an involuntary way (for example, in the case of lack
of knowledge or misunderstanding of the rule) and de-
termine with their actions if social rules are successful
or not in their normative intentions. Furthermore, hu-
mans do not play ever a single “game” at once. In a
broader sense, humans are always players of several
games simultaneously, or to put it differently, they are
agents concerned in the same moment by many dif-
ferent institutions, sometimes conflicting, created by
habits, social rules and legal order.
In the present paper we propose a framework that
aims to take explicitly all of this into account. Our ob-
jective is a partial alignment of the representations of
law with actual social structures and existing imple-
mentations of law. Descriptions of those are present
for example in legal narratives, in the form of court
decisions or anecdotes by legal experts, where a con-
structed theory, at least partially, is explicitly stated.
Thus, using our framework, models of agents or roles
involved in a social scenario could be animated, out-
lined from a story, enriched with knowledge from
experts and/or referring to the sources of regulation,
with the possibility of integrating game-theoretic be-
havioural theories. As operative result, such a sim-
ulation would furnish a support to understand the so-
cial (institutional) dynamics: validating the domain of
conceptualization of the experts, making predictions,
suggesting improvements to regulations.
Along with this paper, a preliminary implementa-
tion has been developed, using an existing multi-agent
system platform. Although successful, this experi-
ence showed the necessity of creating (or extending)
a platform with an explicit ABM approach in order
to attain a full computational deployment of the pro-
posed framework. This is one of the directions of our
future research.
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