Legal code

Template:Anattitle-def Go Premium Template:Anatresources-defTemplate:Anatnavigation-def Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

How about this for a project: Reduce the potential logic of legal contracts down to set of linguistic expressions or axioms. There are surely only a certain number of propositions that are articulated in a normal legal contract. Even if there is an indefinite set of axioms, the number of common axioms must be finite and relatively manageable. So take industry standard contracts, for example, and reduce them to those propositions. These axioms can be agreed, open-sourced, even if the articulation of them on a contract is not.

So, to take Section 2(a)(i) of the ISDA Master Agreement:

Each party will make each payment or delivery specified in each Confirmation to be made by it, subject to the other provisions of this Agreement.

might become

{{subject|Each party}} {{commitment|will}} {{action|make each payment or delivery specified in each Confirmation to be made by it}}, {{condition|subject to the other provisions of this Agreement.}}

Or

 {{subject|everyone}} {{commitment|must}} {{action|pay}} {{conjunction|or}} {{action|deliver}} {{object|obligations in Confirm}} {{condition|per Agreement}} 

The point being that “agrees to”, “will”, “shall”, “must”, “is obliged to”, “shall be obligated to”, “shall unconditionally be obligated to” and so on all code back to “{{commitment|must}}”.

Ideally a lawyer would be able to code from principles.