Reflections on the design, applications and implementations of the normative specification language eFLINT

2025-11-15

AI Summary

To address challenges in legal compliance checking—including high subjectivity in regulatory interpretation, dynamic evolution of legislation, and difficulties in cross-disciplinary collaboration—this paper introduces eFLINT, a domain-specific language for computable modeling and automated verification of legal rules, regulatory requirements, and contractual clauses. eFLINT integrates declarative and procedural paradigms, explicitly linking legal concepts to executable computational logic. It combines formal specification, context-aware reasoning, and scenario-based modeling to enable dynamic, end-to-end compliance verification across system design, runtime, and post-execution phases. Designed to balance expressiveness and executability, eFLINT reconciles conflicting requirements through principled language design. Drawing on multi-scenario industrial deployments, the paper distills actionable design principles and a methodology for automation-oriented compliance languages. It contributes both a reusable technical framework and theoretical foundations for computable regulation research in legal technology.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Law, Justice, Regulation & Governance

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications

Abstract

Checking the compliance of software against laws, regulations and contracts is increasingly important and costly as the embedding of software into societal practices is getting more pervasive. Moreover, the digitalised services provided by governmental organisations and companies are governed by an increasing amount of laws and regulations, requiring highly adaptable compliance practices. A potential solution is to automate compliance using software. However, automating compliance is difficult for various reasons. Legal practices involve subjective processes such as interpretation and qualification. New laws and regulations come into effect regularly and laws and regulations, as well as their interpretations, are subjected to constant revision. In addition, computational reasoning with laws requires a cross-disciplinary process involving both legal and software expertise. This paper reflects on the domain-specific software language eFLINT developed to experiment with novel solutions. The language combines declarative and procedural elements to reason about situations and scenarios respectively, explicates and formalises connections between legal concepts and computational concepts, and is designed to automate compliance checks both before, during and after a software system runs. The various goals and applications areas for the language give rise to (conflicting) requirements. This paper reflects on the current design of the language by recalling various applications, the requirements they imposed, and subsequent design decisions. As such, this paper reports on results and insights of an investigation that can benefit language developers within the field of automated compliance.

Problem

• Automating legal compliance checks for software systems
• Addressing subjective legal processes like interpretation and qualification
• Bridging legal expertise with computational reasoning requirements

Innovation

• Combines declarative and procedural reasoning elements
• Formalizes connections between legal and computational concepts
• Automates compliance checks throughout software system lifecycle