Related papers: Pacta sunt servanda: legal contracts in Stipula
Stipula is a domain-specific programming language designed to model legal contracts with enforceable properties, especially those involving asset transfers and obligations. This paper presents a methodology to formally verify the…
Using dedicated software to represent or enact legislation or regulation has the advantage of solving the inherent ambiguity of legal texts and enabling the automation of compliance with legal norms. On the other hand, the so-called…
Smart Contracts use computer technology to automate the performance of aspects of commercial agreements. Yet how can there be confidence that the computer code is faithful to the intentions of the parties? To understand the depth and…
Smart Contract Templates support legally-enforceable smart contracts, using operational parameters to connect legal agreements to standardised code. In this paper, we explore the design landscape of potential formats for storage and…
In this position paper, we consider some foundational topics regarding smart contracts (such as terminology, automation, enforceability, and semantics) and define a smart contract as an automatable and enforceable agreement. We explore a…
This paper concentrates on the representation of the legal relations that obtain between parties once they have entered a contractual agreement and their evolution as the agreement progresses through time. Contracts are regarded as process…
An approach to the formal description of service contracts is presented in terms of automata. We focus on the basic property of guaranteeing that in the multi-party composition of principals each of them gets his requests satisfied, so that…
Law at large underpins modern society, codifying and governing many aspects of citizens' daily lives. Oftentimes, law is subject to interpretation, debate and challenges throughout various courts and jurisdictions. But in some other areas,…
Smart contracts can implement and automate parts of legal contracts, but ensuring their legal compliance remains challenging. Existing approaches such as formal specification, verification, and model-based development require expertise in…
Contracts are an essential and fundamental component of commerce and society, serving to clarify agreement between multiple parties. While digital technologies have helped to automate many activities associated with contracting, the…
We describe a method and tool called \textit{ContractCheck} that allows for the consistency analysis of legal contracts, in particular Sales Purchase Agreements (SPAs). The analysis relies on an encoding of the premises for the execution of…
The paper outlines ongoing research on logic-based tools for the analysis and representation of legal contracts of the kind frequently encountered in large-scale engineering projects and complex, long-term trading agreements. We consider…
Monitoring the compliance of contract performance against legal obligations is important in order to detect violations, ideally, as soon as they occur. Such monitoring can nowadays be achieved through the use of smart contracts, which…
Smart contracts codify real-world transactions and automatically execute the terms of the contract when predefined conditions are met. This paper proposes SmartML, a modeling language for smart contracts that is platform independent and…
Business contracts, particularly sale and purchase agreements, often contain a large number of clauses and are correspondingly long and complex. In practice, it is therefore a great challenge to keep track of their legal context and to…
Nowadays, sophisticated domains are emerging which require appropriate formalisms to be specified accurately in order to reason about them. One such domain is constituted of smart contracts that have emerged in cyber physical systems as a…
Checking the compliance of software against laws, regulations and contracts is increasingly important and costly as the embedding of software into societal practices is becoming more pervasive. Moreover, the digitalised services provided by…
We speak of a \textit{computational law} when that law is intended to be enforced by software through an automated decision-making process. As digital technologies evolve to offer more solutions for public administrations, we see an…
A computable contract is a contract that a computer can read, understand and execute. The financial services industry makes extensive use of contracts, for example, mortgage agreements, derivatives contracts, arbitration agreements, etc.…
This paper outlines key design principles of Scilla---an intermediate-level language for verified smart contracts. Scilla provides a clean separation between the communication aspect of smart contracts on a blockchain, allowing for the rich…