Esplex: A rule and conceptual model for representing statutes

Exercising Due Diligence in Legal Requirements Acquisition: A Tool-supported, Frame-Based Approach

“…To maintain traceability, the FBRAM includes a document model that maps acquired legal require-ments to official indices and titles for parts, sections and paragraphs [7]. For example, the document model maps the cross-reference §164.520(a)(2)(ii) to the two requirements "to maintain a notice" (lines 1-16) and "to provide a notice" (lines [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][17][18][19], whereas reference §164.520(a)(2)(ii)(A) to the sub-paragraph only refers to the first of these two requirements. The case studies reveal that the document model is critical to assist engineers with integrating constraints on requirements that are cross-referenced from other paragraphs.…”

“…Early efforts to model legislation and statutory law identified important challenges to legal requirements acquisition, including: legal models should match the language and structure of legal documents [17,18] and normalize expressions of the logical structure [1,3]; models should map between acquired logical propositions and corresponding paragraphs in the law [17,18]; and models should syntactically and semantically explicate ambiguity [3]. The FBRAM, partially presented herein, addresses each of these challenges.…”

Regulatory Requirements Traceability and Analysis Using Semi-formal Specifications

“…Among many others, this includes work by Biagoli et al [2] and Sergot et al [29] to express statutes as logic programs. Allen and Saxon describe the A-Hohfeld language [1] based on Hohfeld's legal concepts [18].…”

“…While such an exemption could be stated in a definition using the excludes operator "~", exemptions provide a mechanism to tighten meanings across a document cross-section, unbounded by a single term-of-art or definition. (5), including any imported definitions, onto 603A.215; this mapping includes the inner link from data storage device to facsimile, and the outer links to requirements in 603A.215(1) and (2). Last, the exemption 603A.215(4)(a) is mapped (in red) onto requirements 603A.215 to exclude interpretations implied by definitions.…”

Assessing regulatory change through legal requirements coverage modeling

“…The method consists of three steps: the analyst: (1) manually translates a regulation text into the legal requirements specification language (LRSL); (2) generates logical expressions from the LRSL-encoded law; and (3) applies the coverage model by making assertions about these logical expressions, assigning truth values to propositions, e.g. "am I a 'body corporate'?"…”