Contract interpretation is an understudied topic in the economic analysis of contract law. This paper combines simple formal analysis of the tradeoffs involved in interpretation with applications to the principal doctrines of contract interpretation, including the “four corners” rule, mutual mistake, contra proferentum, and what I call the (informal but very important) rule of “extrinsic nonevi...

We report on our experiences in teaching lightweight formal methods with Eiffel. In particular, we discuss how we introduce formal methods via Eiffel’s design-by-contract and agent technologies, and how we integrate these techniques with test-driven development, in an approach called specification-driven design. This approach demonstrates how formal methods techniques fit with industrial softwa...

Testing of a software system is always based on a contract between the system under test and its environment. Formal mathematical methods provide languages that allow defining such contracts unambiguously, soundly, and succinctly. Since object-oriented programs emphasise encapsulation of internal object state and interaction between objects through method calls, it is natural to base a testing ...

We continue the study, started in [5], on the formal relationships between a domain specific contract language (BCL) and the logic of violation (FCL) proposed in [6, 7]. We discuss the use of logical methods for the representation and analysis of business contracts. The proposed analysis is based on the notions of normal and canonical forms of contracts expressed in FCL. Finally we present a ma...

In this paper we present a framework to analyze conflicts of contracts written in structured English. A contract that has manually been rewritten in a structured English is automatically translated into a formal language using the Grammatical Framework (GF). In particular we use the contract language C L as a target formal language for this translation. In our framework C L specifications could...

We define a formal contract language along with subcontract and compliance relations. We then extrapolate contracts out of processes, that are a recursion-free fragment of ccs. We finally demonstrate that a client completes its interactions with a service provided the corresponding contracts comply. Our contract language may be used as a foundation of Web services technologies, such as wsdl and...

Nowadays, modern applications are often constructed by reusing and assembling distributed and collaborating entities, e.g., software components, Web services, or Software as a Service in cloud computing environments. In order to facilitate the integration of independently developed components (i.e., peers) that may reside in different organizations, it is necessary to provide a global contract ...