Philosophy of Law · Legal Ontology · Ethics
I develop structural frameworks for legal reasoning, moral obligation, and institutional repair — treating law and ethics not as normative codes but as architectures of relational being that can be formally modeled, diagnosed, and rebuilt.
My research develops formal structural accounts of law, ethics, and legal reasoning as interconnected projects, each grounded in relational ontology and each generating operational tools for practitioners, students, and researchers.
A formal ontology of legal systems grounded in roles, authority, recognition, obligation, contradiction debt, and institutional repair. Includes the 8-node Minimum Legal Chain (MLC), a 13-type contradiction typology, and the Irreversible Accountability Test.
Explore SOoL →A relational ontology of ethics modeling moral obligation as a structured field shaped by direction, trust, contradiction debt, and repair. Accompanied by SimEthica, an agent-based simulation platform, and the GoG+IAT Moral Reasoner.
Explore GoG →A structurally grounded extension of the standard IRAC legal reasoning method. Integrates legal ontology and contradiction diagnostics into analytical legal reasoning — bridging formal ontology and everyday legal practice.
Launch IRAC+ →My work begins from dissatisfaction with approaches that treat law and ethics as purely linguistic or normative abstractions. I approach legal and moral systems as structured realities composed of roles, obligations, permissions, powers, and failures — sustained by institutional recognition and vulnerable to structural collapse.
Trained in philosophy under Barry Smith (one of the founders of Basic Formal Ontology) and in law at Buffalo, I apply the methods of formal ontology — developed in the biological and information sciences — to legal and ethical systems. The result is frameworks that are simultaneously philosophical, operational, and teachable.
"A recurring theme across my work is contradiction not as a logical error but as a structural condition. Legal systems fail when recognitions misalign, authorities overreach, or obligations lack correlates — producing contradiction debt that demands repair."
This structural orientation cuts across my three main research programs: SOoL formalizes law's architecture; the Geometry of the Good formalizes the analogous structure in moral life; IRAC+ makes both frameworks operational in legal reasoning.
Author and editor of books and articles in philosophy of law, ethics, scientific integrity, and technology. Full list available on Google Scholar.
Beyond the theoretical frameworks, I build operational systems — formal tools, markup languages, and interactive platforms that extend the research into practical use.
Online toolset for ontology validation, first-order logic testing, and OWL/RDF reasoning. Supports applied ontology research and student exercises. Hosted at ontology.davidkoepsell.com.
Walk any legal scenario through the 8-node Minimum Legal Chain. Assess closure, identify contradiction types, and generate a full SOoL audit report with contradiction debt rating.
Agent-based simulation platform developed alongside the Geometry of the Good. Models obligation vectors, contradiction debt, and repair dynamics in formal relational systems. The Adaptive version adds heritable dispositions and emergent moral archetypes.
A BFO-grounded social ontology lab — an interactive environment for simulating how social entities, roles, and institutional structures form and persist. Extends the formal-ontology methods of SOoL and GoG into a sandbox for social reality itself.
Interactive diagnostic operationalizing the Irreversible Accountability Test. Makes moral structure visible — distinguishing agency, obligation, and where repair is required.
A formal markup language for representing Dungeons & Dragons adventures, narrative structure, and gameplay state. An application of formal ontology methods to creative systems.
A growing public library of formal ontologies, each rendering a body of philosophical or legal thought into the Basic Formal Ontology and validating it for logical consistency with the HermiT reasoner. Each is browsable, citable, and free — built with BFO-Agent, a dialogue architecture that pairs language-model extraction with reasoner-validated commitments.
A formal ontology of Spinoza's Ethics, extracted from the Elwes translation. Full per-class provenance links every concept to the proposition that produced it. Five-part navigation following the structure of the work.
A formal ontology of Leibniz's philosophical works, drawn from Duncan's 1890 anthology — the Monadology, the correspondence with Clarke, the New System of Nature, and more. Thirty-six selections spanning 1679–1716.
A formal rendering of my own relational ethics — obligation discovered ontologically wherever conscious beings encounter one another. The structural skeleton of the 2025 book, made inspectable: directedness, recognition, fidelity, rupture.
The largest of the library — nearly 6,900 classes describing law as a structured region of social reality: norms, powers, roles, obligations, persons, institutions. Derived from the forthcoming Palgrave book; source shown as brief scholarly-provenance fragments.
Recent honors and funded work recognize and extend the research and teaching programs.
SOoL and GoG are designed to be taught. Both include self-contained teaching packages suited for jurisprudence, legal theory, philosophy of law, AI & law, and ethics courses — with zero preparation overhead for instructors.
"Students don't just learn about jurisprudence. They use it. A student who runs the Nazi Racial Laws through the auditor and watches Nodes 6–8 collapse while 1–5 close has learned something that no lecture on Hart or Dworkin delivers with the same force."
Guest lectures and workshops are available for jurisprudence, legal theory, international law, and AI & law courses. Researchers applying formal ontology in legal or ethical contexts are welcome to reach out directly.