2021/10/21 by Silvia Crafà, Silvia Crafa, Cosimo Laneve +4 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence in Law #Business Process Modeling and Analysis #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation #Programming Languages (cs.PL) #cs.PL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.11069
openalex publication_date 2021/10/21 · arxiv published 2021/10/21 · arxiv updated 2021/10/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
There is a growing interest in running legal contracts on digital systems, at the same time, it is important to understand to what extent software contracts may capture legal content. We then undertake a foundational study of legal contracts and we distill four main features: agreement, permissions, violations and obligations. We therefore design Stipula, a domain specific language that assists lawyers in programming legal contracts through specific patterns. The language is based on a small set of abstractions that correspond to common patterns in legal contracts, and that are amenable to be executed either on centralized or on distributed systems. Stipula comes with a formal semantics and an observational equivalence, that provide for a clear account of the contracts' behaviour. The expressive power of the language is illustrated by a set of examples that correspond to template contracts that are often used in practice.