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 fo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: WATT, Seng Joe, GOODENOUGH, Oliver, WONG, Meng Weng (HUANG Mingrong)
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/4367
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sol_research/article/6325/viewcontent/9._Deontics_and_time_in_contracts.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
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Summary: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.