The Stipula Platform: A Workbench for Programming and Analyzing Legal Contracts

Stipula is a domain-specific programming language specifically designed to model and enforce legal contracts. This paper presents the foundational design principles of Stipula, focusing on its ability to express and regulate permissions, obligations, prohibitions, and escrows. We introduce a comprehensive suite of tools developed to support contract development in Stipula, including a visual code editor for intuitive contract authoring, an interpreter for automatic execution, and a number of analyzers for verifying several legally relevant properties (unreachability of clauses, absence of frozen assets, etc.). These tools are integrated into a unified workbench, designed to empower legal practitioners and developers to write, test, debug, and manage legal contracts effectively and efficiently.