Formalizing Decisional and Operational Roles in Legal Contracts via Term-Modal Logic

Translations of legal contracts into formal specifications that can be used for assisted reasoning are currently gaining considerable attention in AI and law. Yet, the conceptual intricacy of some of the normative notions involved in legal contracts continues to provide significant challenges to formalization; in accordance with this, there is a need for developing general logic frameworks which allow for an appropriate analysis of the fundamental components of a contractual situation. In the present work, we focus on the representation of decisional and operational roles played by possibly distinct contracting parties. We provide a flexible framework, which extends term-modal logic, where such roles can be effectively formalized and emphasized.