ProLaLa 2023

Workshop on Programming Languages and the Law 2023

Law at large underpins modern society, codifying and governing many aspects of citizens’ daily lives. Oftentimes, law is subject to interpretation, debate and challenges throughout various courts and jurisdictions. But in some other areas, law leaves little room for interpretation, and essentially aims to rigorously describe a computation, a decision procedure or, simply said, an algorithm.

The current state of affairs is concerning: in many cases, human-critical systems are implemented using technology that is several decades old, resulting in e.g. the IRS relying on assembly code from the 60s or its French counterpart relying on a home-made language from the 90s with tens of thousands of global variables. For institutions stuck with this unfortunate status quo, consequences are many: legacy systems cannot be evolved, in spite of hundreds of millions of dollars spent on “modernization” budgets; mistakes are made and rarely noticed; automatic analyses remain elusive, meaning policymakers are “flying dark”; and in the worst case, as happened with the French military pay computation, families are on the verge of bankruptcy because of incorrect code.

In recent years, the programming languages community has begun to tackle the problem of creating transparent, user-friendly, and accountable systems that model, operate within or interface with legal domains and problems. In 2022, we held the first Workshop on Programming Languages and the Law (ProLaLa 2022). The workshop was a strong success, with participants from around the world, and from both academia and industry. Presentations included work on languages for legal domains, verification tools for legal expert systems, and emerging platforms and technologies like smart contracts. This year, we hope to build on last year’s success by showcasing novel and interesting work at the intersection of programming languages, and legal areas and applications.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Description

Law at large underpins modern society, codifying and governing many aspects of citizens’ daily lives. Oftentimes, law is subject to interpretation, debate and challenges throughout various courts and jurisdictions. But in some other areas, law leaves little room for interpretation, and essentially aims to rigorously describe a computation, a decision procedure or, simply said, an algorithm.

The current state of affairs is concerning: in many cases, human-critical systems are implemented using technology that is several decades old, resulting in e.g. the IRS relying on assembly code from the 60s or its French counterpart relying on a home-made language from the 90s with tens of thousands of global variables. For institutions stuck with this unfortunate status quo, consequences are many: legacy systems cannot be evolved, in spite of hundreds of millions of dollars spent on “modernization” budgets; mistakes are made and rarely noticed; automatic analyses remain elusive, meaning policymakers are “flying dark”; and in the worst case, as happened with the French military pay computation, families are on the verge of bankruptcy because of incorrect code.

In recent years, the programming languages community has begun to tackle the problem of creating transparent, user-friendly, and accountable systems that model, operate within or interface with legal domains and problems. In 2022, we held the first Workshop on Programming Languages and the Law (ProLaLa 2022). The workshop was a strong success, with participants from around the world, and from both academia and industry. Presentations included work on languages for legal domains, verification tools for legal expert systems, and emerging platforms and technologies like smart contracts. This year, we hope to build on last year’s success by showcasing novel and interesting work at the intersection of programming languages, and legal areas and applications.

Submission guidelines

This will be an informal workshop without any proceedings, meant to stimulate discussion and collaboration, and build community. To that end, submitting ongoing and experimental work, and position papers is encouraged. However, starting this year we require that work presented be novel, or at least represent a meaningful and substantial extension of work that has been presented at the 2022 instance of this workshop.

Two types of submissions will be considered: extended abstracts (up to 5 pages without references) and short talk proposals (up to 2 page without references).

All submissions should be formatted using the official ACM acmsmall article format, similar the format for major programming languages conference proceedings. Instructions for authors can be found here.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• language design for legal matters
• static analysis of legal texts
• program synthesis and repair for legal software components
• formal modeling of legal semantics
• program verification for legal expert systems.

Submissions should be sent via the ProLaLa HotCRP instance.

Extended abstracts

The default submission is an extended abstract, which, if accepted, will result in a 20 min. presentation slot during the workshop.

Short talks proposals

Alternatively, for work that is very speculative or brief previews of ongoing work, we also offer the option of submitting short talks proposal, whose length shall not exceed 10 min.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: Thursday, October 27th 2022 AoE
• Notification of acceptance: Thursday, November 10th 2022

Remote participation policy

We plan to coordinate with the POPL conference on remote participation. We would like to have remote participation even if the workshop happens in person. Our plan is to create an inclusive environment that does not demand traveling for COVID-19 (or other) reasons.