Argumentation-Based Legal Requirements Engineering: The Role of Legal Interpretation in Requirements Acquisition

The elicitation of legal requirements is more complex than the analysis of relevant legislation, subsidiary regulations or industrial standards. This paper aims to start bridging the efforts in legal informatics with those of legal requirements engineering towards effective legal requirements acquisition. The paper traces the steps involved in the interpretive process to illustrate how legal interpretation may affect the acquisition and specification of legal requirements for a given system. We apply informal logic to bridge the gap between the principles of interpretation in legal theory with the legal rules that determine compliance of business processes. We specifically apply argumentation schemes to characterize interpretive arguments which are then applied to business processes represented using value modelling. Other argumentation schemes are also applied to help generate the foregoing arguments and give structure to the interpretive process generally.