著者

東条 敏 萩原 信吾

出版者

JAIST Press

巻号頁・発行日

vol.3, 2008-06

---

In 2002, Toyama Prefecture in Japan had a change of policy allowing residents to submit various kinds of forms electrically, in accordance with the development of the Internet. At that time, many municipal officers were forced to rewrite regional ordinances by hand. Legal codes are intrinsically destined to be modified and revised in later years, to catch up with the requirements of our society. However, with each revision the coherence of the code is threatened, and in worse cases it may contain discordance and inconsistency in itself. In many research on legal reasoning, researchers often regard that the code is always consistent though they may sometimes need to add incomplete knowledge to get beneficial consequences. However, when a new legislation, jurists need to inspect rigidly whether it is coherent with existing one. In this revision procedure, jurists must assess how the affected area is large. If (s)he finds discordance with a new legislation, and (s)he modifies it, then (s)he needs to search for the affected area further from the newly revised law recursively. Thus, such a revision would be a tedious and painstaking work. Our motivation in this study is to identify the affected area automatically and to detect discordance in a practical code.