Related papers: Automated Consistency Analysis for Legal Contracts
Smart Contracts (SCs) are programs stored in a Blockchain to ensure agreements between two or more parties. Due to the unchangeable essence of Blockchain, failures or errors in SCs become perpetual once published. The reliability of SCs is…
While most social norms are informal, they are often formalized by companies in contracts to regulate trades of goods and services. When poorly written, contracts may contain normative conflicts resulting from opposing deontic meanings or…
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…
Given the large size and volumes of contracts and their underlying inherent complexity, manual reviews become inefficient and prone to errors, creating a clear need for automation. Automatic Legal Contract Classification (LCC)…
Verifying specifications for large-scale modern engineering systems can be a time-consuming task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of modest size. Recently, contract-based design and verification has been proposed…
Smart contracts provide the means to stipulate rules of interaction between mutually distrustful organizations. They encode contractual agreements on the basis of source code, which else need to be contractualized in natural language. While…
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…
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal contract between a service provider and a consumer, representing a crucial instrument to define, manage, and maintain relationships between these two parties. The SLA's ability to define the…
Many digital systems are designed as collections of asynchronous processes orchestrated by a domain-specific scheduler. The verification of such scheduler-restricted asynchronous systems (SRA) is challenging due to process-process and…
This paper discusses preliminary investigations on the monitorability of contracts for web service descriptions. There are settings where servers do not guarantee statically whether they satisfy some specified contract, which forces the…
Logs of real-life processes often feature uncertainty pertaining the recorded timestamps, data values, and/or events. We consider the problem of checking conformance of uncertain logs against data-aware reference processes. Specifically, we…
Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems aim to semantically parse building regulations to a set of rules. However, semantic parsing is known to be hard and requires large amounts of training data. The complexity of creating such…
Contract automata allow to formally define the behaviour of service contracts in terms of service offers and requests, some of which are moreover optional and some of which are necessary. A composition of contracts is said to be in…
The rapid integration of large language models (LLMs) into high-stakes legal work has exposed a critical gap: no benchmark exists to systematically stress-test their reliability against the nuanced, adversarial, and often subtle flaws…
Smart contracts enable contract terms to be automatically executed and verified on the blockchain, and recent years have witnessed numerous applications of them in areas such as financial institutions and supply chains. The execution logic…
This paper discusses how model checking, a technique used for the verification of behavioural requirements of dynamic systems, can be usefully deployed for the verification of contracts. A process view of agreements between parties is…
Legal properties involve reasoning about data values and time. Metric first-order temporal logic (MFOTL) provides a rich formalism for specifying legal properties. While MFOTL has been successfully used for verifying legal properties over…
We propose and develop a framework for validating smart contracts derived from e-contracts. The goal is to ensure the generated smart contracts fulfil all the conditions outlined in their corresponding e-contracts. By confirming alignment…
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…
Contract conformance is hard to determine statically, prior to the deployment of large pieces of software. A scalable alternative is to monitor for contract violations post-deployment: once a violation is detected, the trace characterising…