A corpus of L4 encodings of existing legal text.
Every entry here is a body of law — a statute, a regulation, a contract form — encoded in L4, the language for law, together with the evidence that the encoding is faithful: section-by-section citations back to the source, scenario tests, ambiguity registers recording every interpretive choice, projections to executable industry standards (DMN, BPMN), and a signed human review.
From the canons of construction to the construction of canon: where the interpretive tradition leaves construction implicit in a reader's judgement, an entry here carries its construction on its face — which reading was taken at each ambiguous site, on what argument or authority, and what turns on the difference.
Status (2026-08-02): scaffold. The repository shape below is ruled and fixed (single-instruction demo spec, ruling R1); the first subjects arrive with the pipeline's G4 milestone. Nothing here yet claims to be a reviewed encoding.
subjects/
<subject-id>/ one body of law
subject.json the descriptor: sources, corpus modules, projections, version
NOTES.md this subject's idiosyncrasies, in prose
SOURCE-LICENSE.md the terms the quoted legal text carries (see Licensing)
*.l4 the encoding
cases/ dated scenario cases with expected values, machine-evaluated
projections/ emitted DMN / BPMN / other artifacts, with fidelity reports
registers/ fork register · external-modification register · source bundle
report/ the conversion report
gates/ HG1/HG2 grant artifacts — signatures and waivers (see Gates)
The layout is a class/instance design: the generic "⟨body of law⟩: go" template (the
subject-sidecar shape) is the class; each encoding job is an instance expected to veer, and
its divergences are recorded in its own NOTES.md — never by forking the template.
Every subject declares exactly one of:
| status | meaning |
|---|---|
draft |
the encoding exists; no claim of fidelity is made |
adversarially-reviewed |
machine gates passed; independent adversarial review completed |
reviewed |
a named domain expert has signed HG1: the encoding is isomorphic to its source |
The encoding version (semver, in subject.json) numbers the encoding itself — it
increments when the L4 changes. The law-time axis is inside the encoding: L4's
EVAL UNDER RULES EFFECTIVE AT evaluates any entry under the rules effective at a chosen
date, so amended regimes are dated arms in one artifact, not forked files. An encoding at
version 2.1.0 can still answer questions about the law as it stood in 2016.
Review here is not a badge; it is a detached SSH signature over a content digest of the
reviewed files. Each subject's gates/ directory carries the signed payload, the signature,
and the allowed_signers entry. To verify one:
ssh-keygen -Y verify -f gates/allowed_signers -I <signer> -n l4-go-gate \
-s gates/HG1.payload.sig < gates/HG1.payload.txt
A signature binds to content — edit the encoding and the grant visibly no longer verifies. Waivers, where used, are equally on the record: a waiver is a verdict with a reason attached, never an absence. Agents can verify signatures; they cannot make them.
- Everything authored here — encodings, cases, schemas, harnesses, reports — is licensed under Apache-2.0.
- Quoted legal text carries its own terms, recorded per subject in
SOURCE-LICENSE.mdand attributed in NOTICE. United States federal material is in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105 and the edicts-of-government doctrine); United Kingdom legislation is quoted under the Open Government Licence v3 with attribution. - Prose artifacts (conversion reports, commentary, comparison notes) may additionally be
offered under CC-BY-4.0 where a subject's
SOURCE-LICENSE.mdsays so, so they can flow into attribution-share-alike wikis without ShareAlike reaching the encodings.
Encodings here are produced and checked by the pipeline in
legalese/l4-ide — the etc/go/ orchestrator, whose
subject sidecars mirror this repository's layout. This repository holds law; that one holds
tools.