Renvoi in Private International Law: A Formalization with Modal Contexts

The paper deals with the problem of formalizing the renvoi in private international law. A rule based (first-order) fragment of a multimodal logic including context modalities as well as a (simplified) notion of common knowledge is introduced. It allows context variables to occur within modalities and context names to be used as predicate arguments, providing a simple combination of meta-predicates and modal constructs. The nesting of contexts in queries is exploited in the formalization of the renvoi problem.