The Invisible Frames Affecting Wartime Investigations

What are the invisible frames affecting fact-finding processes during armed conflicts? In this chapter I examine normative, cognitive, and legal frames shaping the outcomes of wartime investigations. First, I examine the reliance on the fog of war metaphor to justify practices of unknowing. Secondly, I analyse the role of legal ontology and epistemology in shaping the narrative of military actions. Thirdly, I survey cognitive and motivational biases influencing the collection and construction of facts during armed conflicts. Based on this interdisciplinary framework, I analyse data from the Israeli investigation of the targeted killing of Hamas Leader Salah Shehadeh. The analysis suggests that the combination of future-focused legal epistemology, cognitive and motivational biases, and the fog of war metaphor, generates law-fulfilling prophecies: a decision-making dynamic producing normative evaluations that are consistent with the legal requirements. The outcome is legitimization of otherwise unlawful actions, and perpetuation of faulty processes and human insecurity.

Towards Legal Ontology for Education

Semantic Web using ontology-based knowledge model has been largely applied to e-Learning systems. The use of domain ontologies leverages the transformation of the learning contents of serving human to machine understandable formats. The ontology-based approach could further support e-Learning activities related to legal compliances, such as legally validate learners’ profiles or protecting intellectual rights in e-Learning courses. This study proposes a novel ontological e-Learning framework including the legal knowledge model, the e-Learning knowledge model and the common knowledge model. A customized ontology engineering method is conducted to construct the preliminary version of these specified knowledge models, while a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rule base is constructed to capture knowledge of both laws and domain experts. FOCA based validation is introduced to confirm the feasibility of this proposed framework. Improving the FOCA score of the legal core ontology and enriching both the ontological knowledge model and its SWRL rule base are topics that can be explored in future studies.

Contra Iurem

Giorgio Agamben’s celebrated research in the field of legal ontology has led him to devise a distinction between an ontology of being and an ontology of command—two traditions he divided that Western philosophy has always presented as united. But, behind this division and the supersedence of one ontology over the other, Agamben has himself fallen into the trap he wanted to avoid and actually given back to philosophy what it wanted to take from law but had always been a part of philosophy. Another path should be chosen: a path away from “being” as well as “ought-to-be”—the path of maybe. This is what this chapter will argue.

Law as an Artifact

In this volume leading scholars from both the continental and analytic schools examine how their respective theoretical positions relate to the artifactual nature of law. It offers a complete analysis of what the claim that law—and its units: legal systems, legal norms, and particular legal institutions—is an artifact, in fact, ontologically entails and what consequences, if any, this claim has for philosophical accounts of law. Examining the artifactual nature of law draws attention to the role that intention, function, and action play in the ontological structure of law, and how these attributes interact with rules. It puts the role of author and authorship at the center of its analysis of legal ontology, and widens the scope that functional analysis can legitimately have in legal theory, emphasizing how the content of law depends on how it is used. Furthermore, the appeal to artifacts brings to the fore questions about the significance of concepts for the existence of law, and makes available new tools for legal interpretation. The notion of artifactuality offers a starting point from which to approach the basic dilemma of whether it is meaningful to search for essential, necessary, and sufficient features of law, a question that in current legal theory is put when deciding what kind of enterprise legal theory is from a methodological point of view, namely whether it is descriptive or prescriptive. This volume unearths insights and observations of value to all those looking to deepen their understanding of how the law is understood and experienced.