Modelling legal procedures

A legal procedure in court proceedings is a sequence of actions in which the last action is (the creation of) a(n individual) norm, where the court settles that it is obligatory in the interest of some agents that other agents bring about a certain state of affairs. This paper models legal procedures by using a variant of Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL) enriched with a preference operator for prioritising procedural actions. The key reason towards the usage of PDL is that, in procedural law, claims and resolutions resemble programs to be executed. Requests are organised in a preference order and resolutions have their own dynamics of execution (either spontaneously by the one obliged and/or by force of law).