The development of a widely used Legal Specification Language (LSL), would have several advantages, including the direct coding of both private legal instruments, such as commercial and financial contracts, and public legal rules, such as regulations and legislation. This project is concerned with developing an expressive LSL that will have the capacity (i) to capture the event space salient to legal formulations; (ii) to represent the computational structure of legal specification; and (iii) to allow the execution of the process and workflow embedded in that structure.
While there have been several efforts to create computer programming tools specifically designed for representing legal statements such as statutes, regulations, contracts and other instruments, most only address portions of the problem, and none have so far caught on widely in practical use. The time is right to make a concerted effort to develop an expressive LSP. In addition to the ability to accomplish the tasks above, this protocol should permit relatively easy use by both legal professionals and the general public through accessible and well-designed user interfaces.
News/Updates
On September 8 and 9, more than 50 participants gathered at the Stanford Law School for an initial working session on the Legal Specification Protocol (LSP). Read more about the conference here: Legal Specification Language Development (Oliver Goodenough, Vermont)
