Developing a Legal Specification Protocol: Technological Considerations and Requirements

tags: Rules as Code Oliver Goodenough

Notes

I. Introduction: Background and Need for a Legal Specification Protocol

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held back from delivering the full possible benefit by the lack of a widely shared protocol for expressing legal formulations in executable code.

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Legal automation needs to get out of the AOL phase and on to the World Wide Web.

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hmmm… I kind of liked AOL

Interoperability (the ability to work across many platforms and formats) and generativity (the openness to embody work not anticipated when created) are as important as expressivity

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most haven’t been designed with the full expressivity of broad-based legal specification in mind.

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as they can't and shouldn't be

The LSP should be a public utility, not owned or controlled by any particular private or governmental entity. There is a long history of law operating best as an open-source system

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not just a matter of history or "operating best" - this is an ethical imperative, necessary for rule of law

Contracts present a relatively tractable problem

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Because contracts typically involve only a few parties, often private actors, the coordination problem of getting acceptance of a contract protocol is much less challenging

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II. Focus on Contracts and What They Do

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Contracts also provide for alternative pathways if there is a breakdown in the expected outline

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hard to describe it as a deviation from expectation when you've explicitly planned for it, no?

The commitment structure of contracts helps to solve many of the strategic dilemmas that stand in the way of productive cooperation among parties with potentially divergent interests.

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These alternative pathways correspond, to a significant degree, with the concept of contract exceptions discussed by Grosof and Poon (2004)

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A firm’s business process management software can often manage much of the “happy path”

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societal intervention through an enforcement proceeding may be necessary, with the invocation of some form of dispute resolution forum

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III. Use Cases

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IV. Describing the Computational Requirements/Tools for Accomplishing these Tasks

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two foundational elements: a data standard and a logic standard.

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The data standard must be able to represent, with adequate structure and interoperability, the details about the world that law digests and emits for its operations.

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good luck

The logic/programming standard must be able to state and process the logical connectors to manage the event/consequence chains that compose legal logic.

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Representation of all-important tasks should be possible (theoretical expressivity) but representation of common tasks should be easy (practical expressivity).

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user interfaces that will permit non-coders to construct relatively complex legal formulas in code through intuitively appealing representations.

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good UI approaches turn computational law from a theoretical possibility for the rare coder/lawyer composite to an everyday tool

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It is the volume of inputs and switches that creates complexity, and not the logic itself.

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One further wrinkle is the utility of “defeasible logic” in legal specification.

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modern law consists of complex statements (e.g. the Tax Code) built out of extensive terms applying relatively simple logic in highly involved ways. There may be a place in the future for using more complex logics in legal specification, but simple logic, using conditional statements and supplemented with defeasibility, should be sufficiently expressive for the work of the LSP.

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A key contribution of the LSP should be to constrain the set of things that can be represented

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expose legal formulations to automated tests for completeness or contradiction.

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There is a useful debate on the utility of deontic approaches to representing the law. For the limited case of contracting, however, current, word-based law, such as statutory, regulatory and contract prose, clearly avoids language of moral obligation

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user interface (UI) should provide a relatively intuitive construction space for creating the chains of event and consequence that are the typical output of legal specification.

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Prior art includes the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) initiatives of the Object Management Group (OMG), Contract-Oriented Diagrams, and work on visual contracts by Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera.

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V. Existing Technological Efforts

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LegalXML provides data schemas for a variety of legal information.

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The LegalRuleML approach moves further in the direction of executable representation

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While the project has many sound elements, it has not yet broken through in terms of more generalized application and acceptance.

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Many of the elements that will be present in a contract standard coming from the LSP approach exist already in business process management software.

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these business managements systems are often “imperative,”

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Oliver Goodenough is the principal author of this white paper.

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