The logic programming and knowledge representation communities have been studying the subject for a long time, yielding significant results that are directly usable by the programming languages research community to expand the state of the art in the following areas:
Moreover, we believe that our mission as the technical representatives of an interdisciplinary topic is to keep a critical eye on the usage of automated legal decision systems, and to bake in safeguards and limitations within the design of our tools to comply with the rule of law and the general principles of legal practice: right to appeal, checks and balances, right to legal representation, right to privacy, etc.
For these reasons, we run the Programming Languages and the Law (ProLaLa) workshop whose audience are primarily the people of the Programming Languages (PL) research community embarking on interdisciplinary research with legal scholars. The submissions to ProLaLa should be technical and concern any aspect of PL research intended for application to legal matters. Applied research is explicitly welcome at ProLaLa, as we believe that real-world case studies bring valuable insights to PL research. Non-PL scholars are also invited to submit, provided that their research gives some insights useful to PL research.
The Program Committee (PC) of the ProLaLa workshop should be mainly comprised of PL researchers, from academia or industry. A few members from transdisciplinary backgrounds like Legal Studies, Philosophy of Law or Sociology of Law can also be invited to the PC, to assess that the technical contributions respect the overarching principle of complying with the rule of law and the general principles of legal practice.