As AI products continue to evolve, increasingly legal problems are emerging for the engineers that design them. Current laws are often ambiguous, inconsistent or undefined when it comes to technologies that make use of AI. Engineers would benefit from decision support tools that provide engineer's with legal advice and guidance on their design decisions. This research aims at exploring a new representation of legal ontology by importing argumentation theory and constructing a trustworthy legal decision system. While the ideas are generally applicable to AI products, our initial focus has been on Autonomous Vehicles (AVs).

One of the key expectations of AI product manufacturers for their products is the ability to scale to larger markets, especially across legal systems, with fewer prototypes and lower adaptation costs. This paper focuses on the increasingly dynamic legal compliance challenges faced by designers of AI products in achieving this goal. Based on non-monotonic reasoning, we design an automated reasoning tool to help them better understand the legal implications of their designs in a transnational context and, ultimately, adjust the design of AI products more flexibly. This tool supports the quantitative representation of the strength of legal significance to help designers better understand the reasons for their decisions from their own perspective. To illustrate this functionality, a case study on traffic regulations across the UK, France, and Japan demonstrates the system’s ability to resolve legal conflicts—such as driving-side mandates and speed radar detector prohibitions—through quantitative evaluation.