Abstract
Legal contracts can be amended during their lifetime through the agreement of the parties or in accordance with the doctrines of force majeure and hardship. When legal contracts are defined using a programming language, amendments are made through runtime adjustments to the contract’s behavior and must be expressed by means of appropriate language features. In this paper, we examine the extension of Stipula, a formal language for legal contracts, with higher-order functionality to enable the dynamic updating of contract codes. We discuss the semantics of the language when amendments either extend or override the contract’s functionality. Additionally, we study two techniques for constraining amendments, one using annotations within the contract and another that allows for runtime agreements between parties.
Supported by the SERICS project (PE00000014) under the MUR National Recovery and Resilience Plan funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU – and by the H2020 ERC Project CompuLaw (G.A. 833647).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Silvia Crafa for the many insightful discussions about Stipula and Adele Veschetti for prototyping both Stipula and higher-order Stipula. We also thank the anonymous Coordination referees for the detailed suggestions that considerably improved the paper.
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Laneve, C., Parenti, A., Sartor, G. (2023). Legal Contracts Amending with 
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In: Jongmans, SS., Lopes, A. (eds) Coordination Models and Languages. COORDINATION 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13908. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35361-1_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35361-1_14
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