The Centre for Computational Law has merged with the Centre for AI and Data Governance to form the Centre for Digital Law. The new Centre examines the transformative impact of digital technologies on legal systems, government, society, and economy. Our research, including the Research Programme on Computational Law, continue under its ambit. Our current website will remain operational in this transitional period but we strongly encourage you to visit our new website at cdl.smu.edu.sg and explore the updated features and content. If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact our support team at cclawadmin@smu.edu.sg.
Deontics and Time in Contracts: An Executable Semantics for the L4 DSL
Existing approaches to modelling contracts often rely on deontic logic to reason about norms, and only treat time qualitatively. Using L4, a textual domain specific language (DSL) for the law, we offer a more operational interpretation of norms, based on states and transitions, that also accounts for the granular timing of events. In this paper, we present a higher-level rendering of the loan agreement from Flood & Goodenough in L4, and an accompanying operational semantics amenable to execution and static analysis. We also implement this semantics in Maude and show how this lets us visualize the execution of the loan agreement.