Property conveyances as a programming language

From Legal Contracts to Legal Calculi: the code-driven normativity

“…More complex is instead the formalisation of the semantics of a programming language, which is however essential to have the full understanding of the software, and the certainty of the dynamic contract's behaviour. Legal calculi, such as Catala [31], Orlando [11] and Stipula [19], have the suitable size to fully handle their formal semantics. We discuss below the case of Stipula, which acknowledges the concurrent nature of legal contracts as interaction protocols, and resorts to concurrency theory to define the semantics of contracts and to precisely control complex aspects like nondeterminism.…”

“…Accordingly, several projects are being developed for defining code-driven legal contracts, e.g. [30,17,37,28,24,11,31]. We focus here in the problem of defining suitable programming languages to write legal contracts, since finding the suitable abstraction level for legal languages is still an open issue.…”

“…This is in line with the research approach of desugaring the high level programming language into a core Legal Calculus [12,25], pivoted on few selected, concise and intelligible primitives, together with a precise formalisation. This is the case of the Catala [31] language for modelling statutes and regulations clauses, the Orlando [11] language for modelling conveyances in property law, and the Silica language [16] language for generic smart contracts;…”