Held at JURIX 2026 (VLE-LEGATO@JURIX26)

December 8th 2026, Toulouse, France

 

About the VLE-LEGATO workshop

 

The Workshop on Verifying Law and Ethics, and Legal Autoformalisation (VLE-LEGATO) will be held at JURIX 2026 on December 8th 2026, in Toulouse, France. It aims at bringing together research on the lifecycle of normative AI through two complementary tracks: LEGATO, focusing on norm extraction, autoformalisation, and validation; and VLE, focusing on norm integration, compliance verification, auditing, and certification. Together, VLE-LEGATO connects faithful normative representations with AI systems that comply with legal, ethical, regulatory, and other normative requirements.

 

This call for contributions is dedicated to the VLE Track of the workshop.

 

Worskhop webpage: https://jurisinformaticscenter.github.io/VLE-LEGATO2026/

VLE Track Submission webpage: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vle26

 

Important dates

• Workshop contribution submission deadline: November 10th, 2026 (AoE)

• Notification to contributors: November 20th, 2026

• Camera-ready deadline: November 27th, 2026 (AoE)

• Workshop date: December 8th, 2026 (Toulouse, France)

Aim of the VLE-LEGATO workshop

 

AI systems are increasingly deployed in contexts where their behaviour should be constrained not only by technical requirements but also by laws, regulations, standards, ethical principles, organisational policies, and social norms. Ensuring that such systems behave in accordance with these norms raises fundamental challenges across the entire AI lifecycle. The workshop addresses three interconnected questions: (1) How can norms be extracted, formalised, and represented faithfully? (2) How can they be incorporated into AI systems’ reasoning and decision-making? (3) How can compliance with them be verified, audited, and certified?

 

Recent advances in NLP and LLMs create new opportunities for automatically transforming normative texts into formal representations. However, a syntactically valid representation may omit relevant conditions, misrepresent exceptions, or introduce unintended interpretations. Establishing the faithfulness of formalised norms is therefore an essential foundation for assessing the compliance of systems that use them. Integrating these representations into AI systems introduces further challenges concerning normative reasoning, conflicts between requirements, system behaviour, and human oversight.

 

VLE-LEGATO will address these complementary challenges through two tracks:

 

VLE Track: Verification of Legal and Ethical Compliance. This track focuses on incorporating norms into AI architectures, reasoning, and decision-making, and on verifying, auditing, and certifying system compliance. It also addresses conflicts between legal and ethical requirements, compliance monitoring, and governance.

 

LEGATO Track: Autoformalisation and Validation of Norms. This track focuses on extracting norms from natural-language and other sources, generating formal representations, and assessing whether those representations faithfully capture the relevant normative meaning and inferential behaviour. It also addresses benchmarking, debugging, human feedback, and the maintenance of normative knowledge, with particular attention to legal autoformalisation.

 

Contributions spanning both tracks are particularly welcome, including methods that connect the validation of normative representations with the verification of system behaviour.

 

Topics of Interest

 

VLE Track: Verification of Legal and Ethical Compliance

• Normative reasoning, including obligations, permissions, prohibitions, exceptions, and conflicts

• Integration of legal and ethical norms into AI decision-making, world models, and autonomous systems

• Symbolic, machine-learning, LLM-based, and hybrid architectures incorporating normative constraints

• Specification and verification of ethical properties (fairness, transparency, explainability, and non-discrimination)

• Representation and management of conflicts between legal requirements and ethical considerations

• Formal verification, testing, and debugging of AI systems subject to normative requirements

• Algorithmic auditing and compliance monitoring

• Certification, standardisation, and labelling of intelligent systems

• Practical applications, governance, regulatory frameworks, and case studies

 

LEGATO Track: Autoformalisation and Validation of Norms

• Automatic and semi-automatic extraction, formalisation, and representation of norms from legal sources

• LLM-based, neuro-symbolic, rule-based, and ontology-based approaches to normative representation

• Validation of source faithfulness, including conditions, exceptions, cross-references, and temporal scope

• Semantic and behavioural equivalence of alternative normative representations

• Testing, counterexample generation, and debugging of generated formal representations

• Ambiguity, uncertainty, implicit assumptions, and alternative normative interpretations

• Human-in-the-loop workflows, interfaces, and expert feedback

• Datasets, shared tasks, benchmarks, evaluation metrics, and reproducibility

• Traceability, versioning, maintenance, and governance of normative knowledge

 

Joint Topics

• End-to-end methods connecting norm extraction and autoformalisation with system compliance verification

• Propagation of uncertainty and interpretive choices from normative sources to system behaviour

• Traceability from source norms through formal representations to compliance evidence

• Shared benchmarks evaluating both representation faithfulness and system compliance

• Human oversight throughout the normative AI lifecycle

 

Submission instructions
Authors should submit their contribution on the track they would like to present their work:

• LEGATO track instructions: https://jurisinformaticscenter.github.io/VLE-LEGATO2026/LEGATO/index.html

• Contributions for the VLE track should be submitted on https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vle26

Contribution submissions for the VLE Track should follow the JURIX format, i.e. all submissions should be formatted using the styles and guidelines in the IOS Press Instructions for Authors and prepared for single-blind peer review. Submissions must comply with Sage’s ethics policies, including its artificial intelligence policy.

 

VLE Track welcomes two categories of contributions : long (10 pages) and short (5 pages). Descriptions of preliminary results or innovative ideas are strongly encouraged. The VLE contributions, together with a summary of the discussion, will be submitted for publication in the CEUR-WS.org proceedings.

 

Workshop chairs

 

VLE Track:

• Grégory Bonnet (GREYC, Université de Caen Normandie)

• Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (LIP6, Sorbonne Université)

• Thomas M. Powers (CSEPP, University of Delaware)

LEGATO Track:

• Georg Borges (Saarland University)

• Nils Holzenberger (Télécom Paris)

• May Myo Zin (Center for Juris-Informatics, ROIS-DS)

• Ken Satoh (Center for Juris-Informatics, ROIS-DS)

Progam committee

 

VLE Track:

• Gauvain Bourgne (Sorbonne Université)

• Céline Castets-Renard (University of Luxembourg)

• Paul Egré (IRL CROSSING, CNRS)

• Jessica Eynard ( Université Toulouse Capitole)

• Hiroshi Hosobe (Hosei University)

• Benjamin Icard (Sorbonne Université)

• Emiliano Lorini (IRIT, CNRS)

• Jean-Guy Mailly (Université Toulouse Capitole)

• Luis Gustavo Nardin (IMT Mines Saint-Étienne)

• Giovanni Sartor (University of Bologna)

• Ken Satoh (Center for Juris-Informatics)

LEGATO Track:

• Michał Araszkiewicz (Jagiellonian University)

• Yufan Cai (National University of Singapore)

• Wachara Fungwacharakorn (Center for Juris-Informatics)

• Randy Goebel (University of Alberta)

• Guido Governatori (Central Queensland University)

• Zhe Hou (Griffith University)

• Yuntao Kong (Center for Juris-Informatics)

• Anelia Kurteva (University of Birmingham)

• Davide Liga (University of Luxembourg)

• Makoto Nakamura (Niigata Institute of Technology)

• María Navas-Loro (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)

• Ha-Thanh Nguyen (VinUniversity)

• Le-Minh Nguyen (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

• Minh-Phuong Nguyen (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

• Katsumi Nitta (Center for Juris-Informatics)

• Livio Robaldo (Swansea University)

• Galileo Sartor (Swansea University)

• Diogo Campos Sasdelli (University for Continuing Education Krems)

• Giovanni Sileno (University of Amsterdam)

• Satoshi Tojo (Asia University)

• Vu Duc Tran (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

• Sabine Wehnert (Ruhr University Bochum & Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg)

• Adam Wyner (Swansea University)

Contacts

 

For further information, please contact Gregory Bonnet (gregory.bonnet@unicaen.fr) for VLE track or May Myo Zin (maymyozin@nii.ac.jp) for LEGATO track.

 

Sponsors

 

The VLE Track is supported by the “Computational Aspects of Ethics” (ACE) working group of the French CNRS RADIA (Reasoning, Learning, and Decision-Making in Artificial Intelligence) research group.