Legal Norms and Legal Institutions as a Challenge for Legal

Abstract. Although legal informatics is on the periphery of jurisprudence, it can make a significant impact on the centre in respect of legal dogmatics. We believe that the impact from legal informatics can be reached through situational legal visualisation and situational terms, for example, by correcting the boundaries of legal terms. The latter is the subject matter of legal theory and hence contributes to the centre of jurisprudence. This paper makes analogy between Begriffsjurisprudenz in the nineteenth century and legal ontologies of the present, and stresses a situational treatment of law in addition to a normative one. Therefore both situational contents and institutional contents are important when representing legal semantics within legal informatics. However, the differences between legal norms, texts and documents have to be taken into account. Legal norms are interpretative products whereas legal documents are tangible products and are represented according to documentary rules. The themes of granularity and metadata remain aside from the norm-institution relationship but emerge in the law-legal informatics relationship. The granularity question, “What is the smallest entity?”, can have different answers in legal documentation: the whole text of a law, an article, a paragraph, or a word. An example of a situational visualisation to discuss is a four-minute film about the familiar “Menzi-Muck timber ” case in which the Swiss Federal Court defined demarcation criteria between favour, gratuitous contract and negotiorum gestio