A general theory of contract conflicts with environmental constraints

Abstract

One advantage of using formal deontic logic to represent and reason about normative texts is that one can analyse such texts in a precise and incontrovertible manner. Conflict analysis is one such analysis technique—assessing whether a number of contracts, or more generally normative texts, are internally consistent, in that they may not lead to a situation in which active norms conflict or even contradict each other. In this paper we extend existing techniques from the literature to address conflicts in the context of environmental constraints on actions regulated by the contract, and which the parties involved can carry out. The approach is logic-agnostic and we show how it can be applied to a service provision contract written in CL.