Academic Symposium: Law + Computation: An Algorithm for the Rule of Law and Justice?

Computation is poised to transform legal services, legal systems, and the law itself. Making the most of innovation and technology, and understanding the benefits and risks, requires deep collaboration between computer scientists and legal professionals (lawyers, academics, etc.). This interdisciplinary symposium brings together researchers working at the intersection of law and computation to explore the effects of computation on law.

Principal Research Fellow, Mr Wong Meng Weng, presented a sneak peek at L4, a formal language currently being designed to express the semantics of laws and contracts. The language builds on a research tradition in symbolic AI that tends more to programming language theory and formal methods than neural-net machine learning. Unlike previous contract languages, L4 is intended for an audience of software developers first, and theoreticians, lawyers, and blockchainers second. (The current syntax is inspired by the database language SQL.) If the research successfully escapes academia, it will provide a platform and protocol for a new generation of LegalTech products and services.