A Software Tool for Legal Drafting

Daniel Gorín
(Dpto. Computación, FCEyN, UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Sergio Mera
(Dpto. Computación, FCEyN, UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Fernando Schapachnik
(Dpto. Computación, FCEyN, UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina)

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.

In Ernesto Pimentel and Valentín Valero: Proceedings Fifth Workshop on Formal Languages and Analysis of Contract-Oriented Software (FLACOS 2011), Málaga, Spain, 22nd and 23rd September 2011, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 68, pp. 71–86.
Published: 12th September 2011.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.68.7 bibtex PDF
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