Jurix 2009, the 22nd edition of the Annual Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, is back to its country of origin, the Netherlands. However, the conference continues to grow internationally. Again, the contibutions are from 4 continents, and 13 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, and USA. This year we received 34 submissions from 15 countries and all 5 continents. After a rigorous selection process where each paper was assessed by three or four referees, 15 papers were accepted as full papers and 6 as short papers.

The accepted papers range over a very wide spectrum of topics in legal informatics. From the traditional (at least for Jurix) contributions on legal document management, argumentation, case based reasoning, dispute resolution, support for legal drafting, ontologies to new areas such as regulatory compliance, normative multi-agent systems, game theory to application areas, for example, fraud detection, legal tutoring system and legal decision support systems.

The main Jurix conference is complemented by the “AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems: Multilingual ontologies, Multiagent systems, Distributed networks (AICOL-09)” workshop and two tutorials on

• Natural Language Processing Techniques for Managing Legal Resources on the Semantic Web

• Business Process Compliance

The workshop covers both some of the most significant issues in contemporary legal informatics and challenging opportunities for use inspired research in this fascinating field.

We thank the members of the Program Committee for their effort and very valuable contribution; without them it would not be possible to maintain and improve the high scientific standard the symposium has now reached.

• Kevin D. Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA

• Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK

• Emilia Bellucci, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

• Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK

• Jon Bing, University of Oslo, Norway

• Guido Boella, University of Torino, Italy

• Danièle Bourcier, CNRS CERSA, University of Paris 2, France

• Pompeu Casanovas, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain

• Tom van Engers, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Enrico Francesconi, ITTIG-CNR, Florence, Italy

• Thomas F. Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany

• Carole D. Hafner, Northeastern University, USA

• Joris Hulstijn, Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Renato Iannella, NICTA, Australia

• Gloria T. Lau, FindLaw & Stanford University, USA

• Arno R. Lodder, VU University Amsterdam & CEDIRE.org, The Netherlands

• Ronald P. Loui, Washington University St. Louis, USA

• Jenny Eriksson Lundström, NITA, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden

• Laurens Mommers, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands

• Zoran Milosevic, Deontik, Australia

• Katsumi Nitta, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama, Japan

• Kees van Noortwijk, Erasmus Universitiy Rotterdam, The Netherlands

• Anja Oskamp, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna, Italy

• Adrian Paschke, TU Dresden, Germany

• Henry Prakken, Universiteit Groningen & Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

• Paulo Quaresma, Universidade de Evora & Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

• Antonino Rotolo, University of Bologna, Italy

• Giovani Sartor, European University Institute, Florence & Cirsfid, University of Bologna, Italy

• Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics, Japan

• Burkhard Schafer, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

• Daniela Tiscornia, ITTIG-CNR, Florence, Italy

• Leon van der Torre, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

• Bart Verheij, Universiteit Groningen, The Netherlands

• Douglas N. Walton, University of Windsor, Canada

• Mary-Anne Williams, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

• Rad0boud Winkels, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• John Zeleznikow, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

Many thanks also to the external referees, for their invaluable support to the work of the Program Committee. We thank the authors for submitting good papers, responding to the reviewers' comments, and abiding by our production schedule. Finally a special thanks to Kees van Noortwijk for taking on the daunting task of organising Jurix 2009 in cooperation with a PC chair from a land down under.

Guido Governatori, Brisbane, October 2009