AI-Driven Statutory Reasoning via Software Engineering Methods

The recent proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies such as pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has opened up new frontiers in computational law. An exciting area of development is the use of AI to automate the rule-based reasoning inherent in statutory and contract law. While this form of reasoning has long been studied using classical techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and formal logic, recent solutions increasingly make use of LLMs; though they are far from perfect. The advent of GenAI has made it possible to treat many of these natural language documents essentially as programs that compute a result given some set of facts. As such, it should be possible to understand, debug, maintain, evolve, and fix these documents using well-studied techniques from the field of software engineering. This article introduces several concepts of automated software testing and program analysis that could potentially be useful in computational law when applied to AI-driven analysis of statutes and contracts.