Suchergebnisse

This paper introduces a novel model of legal digital contracts automatically executable on Blockchain technologies. Legally enforceable and automatically executable digital contracts are receiving a renewed interest, mostly due to the increasing attention towards Blockchain technologies. However, current implementations of digital contracts are still far from being intelligible to humans, because of their differences with traditional written contracts. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a contribution in bridging the gap between traditional contracts and digital contracts towards the goal of making them intelligible and legal valid. Firstly, after highlighting the shortcomings in current technologies when used for legal digital contracts, the paper introduces a new generic specification for legal digital contracts, namely the Intelligible Contract. Secondly, we describe our implementation of Intelligible Contracts and, as a proof of feasibility, we model a simple scenario by means of our implementation. The paper concludes with some ideas for future research on Intelligible Contracts.

In this paper we describe the goals and the organisation of the ongoing project "Norme in Rete" (NIR --- http://www.normeinrete.it), which involves several important Italian institutions and organisations. This project aims at the production of tools for the access to Italian normative documents, and data formats for the standardisation of the text of laws and rules both national and local. One of its many goals is the conversion of the national law corpus into XML.Within the context of this project, our effort has concentrated on the development of an XML DTD already, and of an XML Schema very soon, to describe Italian national and local laws. We illustrate in this paper the overall structure of the DTDs. They are organised in a stricter, normative set of rules, with normative power, for new law drafts, and of a looser, descriptive set of rules for existing documents over which no rules can be imposed. In this paper we examine both types of DTD (strict and loose), their global organisation, the modules for legal elements, for textual and tabular tags (resembling HTML), and for modular, generic elements, that allow easy extendibility to the DTD. Also the treatment of meta-information is examined in this paper.We produce a short account of several analogous experiences in Northern Europe, carried out by both public institutions and private legal publishers. Mention is also made of the European Union's similar projects.