A software development environment for law-governed systems

This paper describes a software development environment based on a new approach for managing large-scale evolving systems. Under this approach, the conventional notion of a <italic>system</italic> is augmented with a new component called the <italic>law of the system</italic>, which is an <italic>explicit</italic> and <italic>strictly enforced</italic> set of rules about the operation of the system, about its evolution, and about the evolution of the law itself. The resulting combination is called a <italic>law-governed system.</italic>