In artificial intelligence and law, legal norms are considered in computational tools to automatically reason upon them.
In multi-agent systems (MAS), a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), a norm is a guide for the common conduct of agents, thereby easing their decision-making, coordination and organization.
Since most problems concerning regulation of the interaction of autonomous agents are linked to issues traditionally addressed by legal studies, and since law is the most pervasive and developed normative system, efforts to account for norms in artificial intelligence and law and in normative multi-agent systems often overlap.
With the arrival of computer applications into the legal domain, and especially artificial intelligence applied to it, logic has been used as the major tool to formalize legal reasoning and has been developed in many directions, ranging from deontic logics to formal systems of argumentation.
[1] Explicit norms are typically represented as a deontic statement that aims at regulating the life of software agents and the interactions among them.