Modiso: a Tool for Building Contract Dispute Resolution Systems

Real-world dispute resolution should be guided by laws, even if such disputes may be resolved by bodies other than the court of laws. Hence in order to build contract dispute resolution systems we need a tool capable of representing, reasoning and programming with contract laws. In this paper we present such a tool called MoDiSo (MOdular Argumentation for DIspute ReSOlution ) which combines the strengths of state-of-the-art argumentation-based techniques for different aspects of law, to propose: first, a modular architecture for contract dispute resolution systems with an edit-compile-dispute loop facilitating incremental system developments; and second, a methodology to represent and reason with legal doctrines in contract laws in the formal language of assumption-based argumentation. We demonstrate the tool with several legal doctrines for performance relief in common law of contracts. As a by-product, we obtain a dispute resolution system capable of explaining legal outcomes by automatically generating relevant arguments.

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