Transactional and semantic Indeterminacy in statutory Modelling

Abstract In creating legal expert systems to represent statutes the aim of the programmer is to design the model with operational paradigms that reflect, as closely as possible, the working of the statutory representation. This is an indeterminate process. Firstly, it must take account of the reduction of disputes to legal codes or forms of action; in other words the means by which lawyers fit the modalities of common speech into semi‐ritualistic patterns of utterance and practice. Secondly, is the indeterminate, elitist and culturally embedded language of lawyers, for which a justification is professed based on a perception of exactitude and logic This, the paper contends, is not so. Statutory terminology (using the Theft Act 1968 as an exemplar) is, at the least, subject to implicit codes and meanings whilst, at the other extreme, may even be tautological. Both elements create indeterminacy. The object of this paper is to examine the nature of that indeterminacy and suggest mechanisms for overcoming it.