Formal Verification of Legal Contracts: A Translation-based Approach

Abstract: Stipula is a domain-specific programming language designed to model legal contracts with enforceable properties, especially those involving asset transfers and obligations. This paper presents a methodology to formally verify the correctness of Stipula contracts through translation into Java code annotated with Java Modeling Language specifications. As a verification backend, the deductive verification tool KeY is used. Both, the translation and the verification of partial and total correctness for a large subset of Stipula contracts, those with disjoint cycles, is fully automatic. Our work demonstrates that a general-purpose deductive verification tool can be used successfully in a translation approach.