LOF-ODP-004: Minimum Legal Chain

Identifier	LOF-ODP-004
IRI	https://w3id.org/lof/odp-004.owl
Repository	https://github.com/legal-ontologies-foundry/lof-odp-004
Status	draft
Version	0.1.0
Depends on	LOF-ODP-001, LOF-ODP-002, LOF-ODP-003
Drafted by	David R. Koepsell
For review by	William Mandrick, Barry Smith

Draft for review

First draft, prepared for discussion by the founding coordinators. Open questions are listed at the end.

Intent

The first three patterns say what legal acts, legal content, legal roles, and legal positions are. They do not say how these fit together when a particular duty or claim comes to exist. A tenant's duty to pay April rent exists because a power to contract was exercised in a signing, which established lease terms, under which the start of April is a triggering occurrence, producing a duty owed to the landlord, backed by a remedy if it is not discharged. Remove any one of these and the duty is either absent or defective.

This pattern connects the eight links of that chain (authority, norm, actor in role, trigger, act, target, effect, remedy) using the classes of ODP-001 to ODP-003, adds the few relations they lack, and defines a class for positions whose chain is complete. A companion set of SHACL shapes reports, node by node, where a chain is incomplete.

Competency questions

1. Under what power, exercised in what act, was the legal content grounding this position established?
2. What occurrence triggered this position, and through what act or occurrence did it come into existence?
3. At whom or what is this position directed?
4. What legal content provides a remedy if this position is not discharged?
5. Which positions were not discharged, during what period, and what remedial positions arose in consequence?
6. Which positions are fully grounded, and at which link does each incomplete chain fail?

Questions 1 to 5 are answered by SPARQL (src/sparql/); question 6 by the defined class and the SHACL shapes (src/shapes/).

Solution

The chain

Node	Cluster	Occupied by	From
1 Source of authority	AUTHORITY	norm-establishing power	ODP-003 power (defined here)
2 Norm	AUTHORITY	legal content	ODP-001
3 Actor in role	AUTHORITY	legal role, realized in the generating act	ODP-002
4 Triggering facts	EFFECT	triggering occurrence	new (defined)
5 Legal act or omission	EFFECT	legal act; omission via undischarged during	ODP-001; new relation
6 Target	RECOGNITION	whatever the position is directed at	new relation
7 Legal effect	RECOGNITION	legal position	ODP-003
8 Remedy	REPAIR	remedial position; remedy provided by	new (defined); new relation

Classes

Label	IRI	BFO parent	Definition
norm-establishing power	ODP004_0001000	power (defined)	A power that is exercised in some legal act that establishes legal content.
triggering occurrence	ODP004_0001001	occurrent (defined)	An occurrent that satisfies a condition, set out in legal content, for some legal position to come into existence.
remedial position	ODP004_0001002	legal position (defined)	A legal position that exists because some other legal position was not discharged, and whose discharge or exercise is directed to making good that failure.
fully grounded legal position	ODP004_0001003	legal position (defined)	A legal position that is grounded in legal content established by a legal act in which some power was exercised, that is triggered by some occurrent, that is generated by a legal act realizing some legal role, that is directed at some entity, and for whose non-discharge some legal content provides a remedy.

All four are defined classes. The pattern introduces no new primitive categories: every entity in a chain is already an ODP-001 to ODP-003 entity or a BFO occurrent.

Relations

Label	IRI	Domain	Range	Definition
generated by	ODP004_0001100	legal position	occurrent	A relation between a legal position and an occurrent through which the position comes into existence.
generates	ODP004_0001101	occurrent	legal position	Inverse of generated by.
triggered by	ODP004_0001102	legal position	occurrent	A relation between a legal position and an occurrent that satisfies a condition, set out in the legal content in which the position is grounded, for the position to come into existence.
directed at	ODP004_0001103	legal position	entity	A relation between a legal position and an entity toward which the position is oriented, either the holder of its correlative position or a thing over which the position obtains.
remedies	ODP004_0001104	legal position	legal position	A relation between a legal position and another legal position, whose non-discharge is the occasion of the first and whose discharge or exercise is directed to making good that non-discharge.
remedy provided by	ODP004_0001105	legal position	legal content	A relation between a legal position and legal content that specifies which remedial positions arise if the position is not discharged.
undischarged during	ODP004_0001106	first-order legal position	temporal region	A relation between a first-order legal position and a temporal region during which no process occurs that complies with the position.

The pattern reuses BFO realizes (BFO:0000055) between the generating act and the actor's legal role.

Axioms (Manchester syntax)

norm-establishing power  EquivalentTo  power
    and (exercised in some (legal act and (establishes some legal content)))
triggering occurrence    EquivalentTo  occurrent and (inverse (triggered by) some legal position)
remedial position        EquivalentTo  legal position and (remedies some legal position)

fully grounded legal position  EquivalentTo  legal position
    and (grounded in some (legal content
          and (established by some (legal act and (inverse (exercised in) some power)))))
    and (triggered by some occurrent)
    and (generated by some (legal act and (realizes some legal role)))
    and (directed at some entity)
    and (remedy provided by some legal content)

correlative of o held by  SubPropertyOf  directed at

The property chain means that party targets are never asserted: a duty whose correlative claim is held by the landlord is inferred to be directed at the landlord. Thing targets (land, a patented invention, a data set) are asserted directly.

Grounding rationale (LOF-P-004)

• Norm-establishing power, remedial position, fully grounded legal position. These are defined subclasses of ODP-003 classes. Their BFO category is whatever the ODP-003 placement decision makes it. This pattern takes no position on that decision, and the repository tests it under both options (see below).
• Triggering occurrence as occurrent. What the law treats as operative is a change: a signing, a death, the start or end of a period. Where a statute speaks of a standing state ("a person who is eighteen"), the operative occurrence is the process boundary at which the state begins. Occurrent, rather than process, is the parent because the end of a period (a temporal instant) is among the most common triggers.
• Omission without negative occurrents. BFO has no category for events that did not happen. The pattern therefore does not reify omissions. It asserts that a position went undischarged during a temporal region, and treats the end of that region as the triggering occurrence of any remedial position.

Example

Continuing the residential lease, with the chain for April rent:

ex:anaContractPower a odp3:0001005 ;        # power
    odp3:0001100 ex:ana ;                   # held by
    odp3:0001101 ex:tenantCode ;            # grounded in
    odp3:0001103 ex:leaseSigning .          # exercised in           (node 1)

ex:leaseSigning a odp1:0001004 ;            # contract formation     (node 5)
    odp1:0001100 ex:leaseTerms ;            # establishes            (node 2)
    obo:BFO_0000055 ex:anaPartyRole .       # realizes               (node 3)

ex:anaAprilRentDuty a odp3:0001002 ;        # duty                   (node 7)
    odp3:0001100 ex:ana ;
    odp3:0001101 ex:leaseTerms ;
    odp3:0001102 ex:northsideAprilRentClaim ;
    odp4:0001102 ex:aprilPeriodStart ;      # triggered by           (node 4)
    odp4:0001100 ex:leaseSigning ;          # generated by
    odp4:0001105 ex:tenantCode .            # remedy provided by     (node 8)

ex:anaAprilRentDuty odp4:0001106 ex:aprilPaymentWindow .   # undischarged during

ex:northsideLateFeeClaim a odp3:0001001 ;   # claim
    odp4:0001104 ex:anaAprilRentDuty ;      # remedies
    odp4:0001102 ex:aprilWindowEnd ;        # triggered by
    odp4:0001100 ex:aprilWindowEnd .        # generated by (operation of law)

Inferred by HermiT, under both ODP-003 options: the rent duty is a fully grounded legal position directed at Northside; the late-fee claim is a remedial position; Ana's contracting power is a norm-establishing power; the start of April and the end of 5 April are triggering occurrences.

The example also contains a defective chain: an oral side promise to repaint, with no trigger, no generating act, and no remedy. It is not classified as fully grounded, and the SHACL report locates the failure:

Position	Node 1	Node 3	Node 4	Node 5	Node 6	Node 8
duty to pay April rent	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓ (inferred)	✓
claim to a late fee	✓	warning	✓	✓	✓ (inferred)	✓
duty to repaint	violation	warning	violation	violation	✓ (inferred)	violation

The warning at node 3 on the late fee is the operation-of-law case (open question 2). The full example is src/examples/lease-chain.ttl.

Alignment with legal standards (LOF-P-015)

This pattern	LegalRuleML	LKIF-Core	Akoma Ntoso
triggering occurrence	antecedent of a prescriptive statement (conditions), close match at the type level	none	eventRef for lifecycle events, partial
remedial position, remedies	reparation statement linking an obligation to a penalty, close match	none	none
legal position	deontic formulas (obligation, permission), partial as in ODP-003	normatively qualified entities, partial	none
norm-establishing power	authority metadata, partial	legal power, close match	TLCOrganization as author of the act, partial

LegalRuleML represents these as parts of rules, that is, at the type level. This pattern represents them at the instance level, as the particular chain behind a particular duty. The two are complementary: a LegalRuleML rule states the conditions, and an ODP-004 chain records that they were met.

Consequences and limitations

• Instance level only. The pattern relates a particular position to the particular trigger and act behind it. It does not say which types of occurrence trigger which types of position. That is the same action-type problem as ODP-003 open question 2, and should be solved once for both.
• Open world. OWL can classify a complete chain but cannot infer that a chain is incomplete, since a missing link may simply be unrecorded. Incompleteness is reported by the SHACL shapes, which should be run on a reasoned graph.
• No temporal ordering. Nothing requires the trigger to precede the position, or the grounding content to predate the act. Temporal constraints are left to domain ontologies.
• Correlative sharing. The shapes accept a link recorded on either member of a correlative pair, so the chain need only be recorded once per legal relation.
• Placement-neutral. make test-options reasons over the example with both ODP-003 options. Both are consistent and yield identical classifications, so adopting this pattern does not prejudge the ODP-003 decision.

Relation to A Structural Ontology of the Law

The eight-node chain is the Minimum Legal Chain of Koepsell, A Structural Ontology of the Law (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), where it underlies a typology of legal contradictions indexed to the links of the chain and a measure of structural instability built on that typology. Only the chain is proposed here. The typology and the measure are theory-specific and are deliberately left out, consistent with LOF-P-008 and LOF-P-009. The node-labeled SHACL report is the point of contact: any diagnostic ontology, SOoL's or another, can consume it without being part of this pattern.

Declaration of interest. The drafter is the author of that book.

Open questions for the founding coordinators

1. Is chain closure a Foundry commitment? Fully grounded legal position builds in two substantive claims: that a legal position requires a remedy (ubi jus ibi remedium), and that it requires an actor in role. Should the Foundry define this class, or publish only the relations and leave closure to the SHACL shapes?
2. Operation of law. Positions arising without any act (the late fee, intestate succession, a newborn's guardian) fail node 3. Should node 3 accept any generating occurrent, should such positions trace their actor to the enactment of the grounding content, or should they be a documented exception? This is also ODP-002's gap for roles arising by operation of law.
3. Omission. Is undischarged during acceptable, or should omission be modeled as the non-realization of a realizable entity? The second is available only under ODP-003 Option A.
4. Remedial regress. The shapes require remedial positions to have remedy provisions of their own. Should there be a terminal category (enforcement by the state) that closes the regress?
5. Thing targets. Positions directed at things rather than persons (property, in rem rights) are supported but not modeled. Do they need their own pattern?

Related patterns

• LOF-ODP-001 supplies legal act (node 5) and legal content (node 2).
• LOF-ODP-002 supplies legal role (node 3).
• LOF-ODP-003 supplies legal position (node 7), power (node 1), and correlative of, from which targets (node 6) are inferred.

Discussion