A Software Tool for Legal Drafting

Although many attempts at automated aids for legal drafting have been made, they were based on the construction of a new tool, completely from scratch. This is at least curious, considering that a strong parallelism can be established between a normative document and a software specification: both describe what an entity should or should not do, can or cannot do. In this article we compare normative documents and software specifications to find out their similarities and differences. The comparison shows that there are distinctive particularities, but they are restricted to a very specific subclass of normative propositions. The rest, we postulate, can be dealt with software tools. For such an enterprise the \FormaLex tool set was devised: an LTL-based language and companion tools that utilize model checking to find out normative incoherences in regulations, contracts and other legal documents. A feature-rich case study is analyzed with the presented tools.

[1]  Fausto Giunchiglia,et al.  NUSMV: a new symbolic model checker , 2000, International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer.

[2]  Guillaume Piolle,et al.  A Dyadic Operator for the Gradation of Desirability , 2010, DEON.

[3]  Christian Johansen,et al.  : An Action-Based Logic for Reasoning about Contracts , 2009, WoLLIC.

[4]  Pablo Noriega,et al.  Normative Multi-Agent Systems , 2013, Normative Multi-Agent Systems.

[5]  Guido Governatori,et al.  Temporalised normative positions in defeasible logic , 2005, ICAIL '05.

[6]  Frank Dignum,et al.  The Role of Deontic Logic in the Specification of Information Systems , 1998, Logics for Databases and Information Systems.

[7]  Constance L. Heitmeyer,et al.  Developing high assurance avionics systems with the SCR requirements method , 2000, 19th DASC. 19th Digital Avionics Systems Conference. Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37126).

[8]  Leon van der Torre,et al.  What is Input/Output Logic? Input/Output Logic, Constraints, Permissions , 2007, Normative Multi-agent Systems.

[9]  Guido Boella,et al.  Permissions and obligations in hierarchical normative systems , 2003, ICAIL.

[10]  Daniel Gorín,et al.  Model Checking Legal Documents , 2010, JURIX.

[11]  Santosh K. Shrivastava,et al.  Model Checking Correctness Properties of Electronic Contracts , 2003, ICSOC.

[12]  Michael Wooldridge,et al.  A Temporal Logic of Normative Systems , 2009, Towards Mathematical Philosophy.

[13]  Guido Boella,et al.  Normative Multi-agent Systems, 18.03. - 23.03.2007 , 2007, Normative Multi-agent Systems.

[14]  Lubos Brim,et al.  DiVinE - A Tool for Distributed Verification , 2006, CAV.

[15]  Mamoun Filali,et al.  A State/Event Temporal Deontic Logic , 2006, DEON.

[16]  C. E. Alchourrón,et al.  The Expressive Conception of Norms , 1981 .

[17]  Satoshi Tojo,et al.  Discordance Detection in Regional Ordinance: Ontology-based Validation , 2006, JURIX.

[18]  Tim French,et al.  Axioms for Obligation and Robustness with Temporal Logic , 2010, DEON.

[19]  Marina De Vos,et al.  Norm Refinement and Design through Inductive Learning , 2010, MALLOW.

[20]  Gerard J. Holzmann,et al.  The Model Checker SPIN , 1997, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[21]  F. Schapachnik,et al.  FormaLex – A Software Tool for Legal Drafting ∗ , 2011 .

[22]  Audun Stolpe,et al.  A theory of permission based on the notion of derogation , 2010, J. Appl. Log..

[23]  Nienke den Haan.  Tools for automated legislative drafting (abstract) , 1997, ICAIL '97.

[24]  Guido Governatori,et al.  DR-CONTRACT: an architecture for e-contracts in defeasible logic , 2009, Int. J. Bus. Process. Integr. Manag..

[25]  Gerard J. Holzmann,et al.  The SPIN Model Checker - primer and reference manual , 2003 .

[26]  Dimitra Giannakopoulou,et al.  Fluent model checking for event-based systems , 2003, ESEC/FSE-11.

[27]  Gabriella Pigozzi,et al.  Ten Philosophical Problems in Deontic Logic , 2007, Normative Multi-agent Systems.

[28]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Designing a Deontic Logic of Deadlines , 2004, DEON.