But with agents, we also need to distinguish between right and wrong, legal and illegal. We need to make this distinction as agent developers, and we might also want the agents to make the distinction. This is so they can be trusted to act according to a set of proscribed ethics and laws, thereby properly representing humans in contractual settings. With emerging applications in mind, we review some of the essential concepts of agent jurisprudence. Let's begin with the simpler aspects of legal reasoning and leave the greater problems of ethics to a later column.
Contracts can also exist among agents, as representatives of human actors.
For simplicity, we consider contracts that involve no more than two agents, although some recent work treats more general settings. Agent researchers, as well as philosophers, have recently begun to study Hohfeld's definitions. As a consequence, they provide inherently multiagent abstractions. Some correlate terms are claim and duty , privilege and exposure , power and liability , and immunity and disability . A claim what one agent can demand from another is the most common kind of right.