The Rulemapping method
Starting from the result.
The Rulemapping method approaches a norm from the question of which statutory requirements trigger a legal consequence – in the tradition of actio-based legal thinking. Legally grounded, fully developed, proven in practice.
Legal craft
What a lawyer does in their head becomes explicit.
Every application of law is subsumption: a set of facts is examined against the statutory requirements of a norm, in ordered sequence, until the legal consequence is established or ruled out. Every lawyer carries out this examination daily – in their head, along a structure that is often only implicit in the normative text.
The Rulemapping method makes this structure explicit. The examination structure of a norm – nested requirements, exceptions, counter-exceptions, references – is represented as an ordered arrangement of nodes, connected by logical operators such as AND and OR. Even what does not stand at the beginning of the normative text is laid out in the statute; the method brings it to the surface and assigns it to the examination path.
Nothing is lost, and nothing is added. The rulemap is not a simplification of the examination – it is the same examination, in explicit form. This is how work has been done since 2009, on statutes as well as on private-sector bodies of rules.
Prohibition, Section 44(1) no. 1
Protected object
Prohibited act
No ground for exclusion
Animal of a specially protected species
Developmental stage
Prohibition, Section 44(1) no. 1
Protected object
Prohibited act
No ground for exclusion
From norm to rulemap
A statutory prohibition, step by step.
“It is prohibited to pursue, capture, injure, or kill wild animals of specially protected species, or to take their developmental stages from nature, damage them, or destroy them.”
Section 44(1) no. 1 BNatSchG
Step 1: The legal consequence
It starts with the question of the result: what does the norm order? Here, a prohibition – the act is impermissible. This legal consequence becomes the top node of the rulemap.
Step 2: The statutory requirements
What must be present for the legal consequence to occur? Two groups, both of which must be fulfilled (AND): the protected object – a wild animal of a specially protected species or one of its developmental stages (OR) – and the prohibited act, depending on the protected object: for the animal, pursuing, capturing, injuring, or killing; for the developmental stage, taking, damaging, or destroying (OR). Each requirement becomes a node of its own, anchored verbatim in the statutory text.
Step 3: Exceptions and order
The examination does not end with the prohibition. Section 44(4) to (6) names grounds for exclusion – such as agricultural, forestry, and fishery land use or unavoidable impairments under Section 15. They become a branch of their own, linked by AND with the prohibitions: the result stands only once both branches have been examined. The complete rulemap for Section 44 has 121 nodes.
Step 4: The examination
The same inputs lead to the same result. Equal treatment, traceability, and challengeability rest on this: anyone who challenges an administrative decision can examine, node by node, how it came about.