Introduction to the Semantics of Law (2018, 2022)

This book has two editions: the Polish edition, and the English one. The Polish version has been published in 2018 (under the title: Wprowadzenie do semantyki prawa). The English version, revised and extended, has been published in 2022, by Springer. 

The book is an introduction to the language of law from the perspective of logical semantics. As a logical tool, Boguslaw Wolniewicz’s formal ontology of situations is adapted. The central issue of the book is the meaning of normative statements, including primarily legal norms.

The main result of the book is an explication of several legal notions (including: legal event, legal act, legal rule) in terms of formal ontology of situations. Other important result of the book is that legal norms are sentences in a logical sense, so some are true and others are false, and their logical value does not depend on whether they were adopted in the law-making process. One more important result of the book is that there are semantic relations between orders that are similar to entailment, contradiction, opposition, and sub-opposition despite the fact that orders are not sentences in a logical sense, i.e. they are neither true nor false.

The English version of the book also presents some original Wittgenstein-style deontic logics built on the first order logic. The formal results are applied to some problems of the theory of law, including the problem of possibility of algorithmic application of legal norms.

Polish Edition:

ISBN: 978-83-935935-1-4

126 pages

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English Edition:

ISBN: 978-3-030-95678-3

ISBN: 978-3-030-95679-0 (eBook)

141 pages