Pacta sunt servanda: legal contracts in Stipula
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2110.11069,
title = {Pacta sunt servanda: legal contracts in Stipula},
author = {Silvia Crafa and Cosimo Laneve and Giovanni Sartor},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.11069},
year = {2021}
}