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Structures of legal language

Many authors have compiled lists of the structures that appear in legal language. The point of view is slightly different depending on if the person who compiled the list is a lawyer, a linguist or a computer scientist. This zettel documents some of the existing classifications.

Law

Adams

Front of the contract

Title, introductory clause, definitions, … TODO

Recitals

A contract includes background information in a part that is called recitals. Adams names three kinds of recitals:

  1. Context recitals: relationships between the parties, previous transactions by the parties, etc.
  2. Purpose recitals: what the parties wish to accomplish. (Terms of the contract are listed in the main part.)
  3. Simultaneous-transaction recitals: describe other components of the transaction, if there are any.

Main contract

Ken Adams introduces 10 main Categories of Contract Language. In the linked table, the categories are given examples and subcategories.

  1. Agreement
  2. Performance
  3. Obligation
  4. Discretion
  5. Prohibition
  6. Policy
  7. Condition
  8. Declaration
  9. Intention
  10. Recommendation

Computer science

Hvitved

Hvitved (2012) lists 16 requirements for contract formalisation.

  1. Contract model, contract language, and a formal semantics
  2. Contract participants
  3. (Conditional) commitments
  4. Absolute temporal constraints
  5. Relative temporal constraints
  6. Reparation clauses
  7. Instantaneous and continous actions
  8. Potentially infinite and repetive contracts
  9. Time-varying, external dependencies (observables)
  10. History-sensitive commitments
  11. In-place expressions [such as arithmetic expressions]
  12. Parametrised contracts
  13. Isomorphic encoding ["formal encodings that are in one-to-one correspondence with the informal paper contracts"]
  14. Run-time monitoring
  15. Blame assignment
  16. Amenability to compositional analysis

Linguistics

Biasiotti and Tiscornia

Biasiotti and Tiscornia (2010) list typical linguistic structures in legal documents. Emphasis mine.

  • a model of the logical structure of legislative texts, understood as a set of statements, that enable the following elements to be identified:

    • information about the document structure: enacting authority, class of source, time, publishing date, versioning, subject, partitions, etc. (Agnoloni et al. 2007),
    • classification of legislative statements according to their illocutive function (to define, to prohibit, to oblige, to sanction …. ) (Biagioli et al. 2008).
    • distinction of language levels, for example, norms that talk about other norms (to repeal them, to amend them, etc.); (Spinosa et al. 2009).

"Document structure" overlaps with Hvitveds 2-3, 8, maybe more. In a traditional contract, some of these things would appear in recitals, some of them in Adams' categories of policy or declaration.

"Illocutive function" looks like Adams' categories of contract language. (Perhaps excluding some of the more meta categories?) Probably Hvitved's requirement 1, "formal semantics" includes all these.

"Distinction of language levels" doesn't seem to have an exact counterpart in neither Hvitved nor Adams. It's a rather meta thing to do. But norms that talk about other norms would likely be in Adams' category of policy. Quoting Adams (emphasis mine), “There are two kinds of policy. First, those that state rules governing a thing, event, or circumstance. And second, those that address the scope, meaning, or duration of a contract or part of a contract.”

  • dependency relations between classes of statements (for example, between a definition and a norm that uses the defined concept, between a norm that obliges and one that provides sanctions in the case of the breach of the obligation, etc.) (Biagioli et al. 2008).

The categories in Adams are logically linked together, like negating an obligation means discretion. More broadly, I interpret the Hohfeldian relations to go under "dependency relations between classes of statements".

  • a model of inner structure of legislative statements, based on:
    • the interpretation of syntactic elements (even if, unless, notwithstanding, and/or, but otherwise, after, …) in terms of logical connectives among propositions (Allen 1986), expressing disjunctions or conjunctions of factual conditions, linked by logical implication to a legal effect or a legal qualification of a status;
    • the distinction between the deontic classification of behaviour and the set of regulated behaviours: the former is knowledge domain independent, the latter expresses common sense knowledge (Francesconi 2009).

The interpretation of syntactic elements in terms of logical connectives is just what formal semantics is about. Both Adams and Hvitved cover that. In addition, Adams talks a lot about pragmatics1. I haven't read enough Hvitved to see if he talks about pragmatics too.

As for deontic classification of behaviour and the set of regulated behaviours, I don't understand what that means. (TODO find out if it's worth finding out?)

Footnotes

  1. For instance, in 3.303 Adams comments on a sentence "Widgetco may sell one or more Vehicles except [Ford]". If we abandon all pragmatics, we notice that nothing is said about the Ford vehicle, so technically Widgetco could sell it and not breach the contract. But pragmatics suggests that the sentence was formulated in this way because the authors wanted to say something about the Ford, and actually meant "Widgetco may sell one or more vehicles, but it may not sell the Ford." ↩