Eiger: Auditable, executable, flexible legal regulations

TL;DR

Eiger is a domain-specific programming language embedded in Haskell that enables precise, auditable, and executable regulation coding, improving automation and compliance in legal frameworks.

Contribution

The paper introduces Eiger, a novel domain-specific language for encoding regulations that is auditable, executable, and user-friendly for domain experts, enhancing legal regulation precision.

Findings

Eiger code resembles Excel formulas and SQL queries, aiding readability.

A user study indicates domain experts can audit regulations without extensive programming knowledge.

Eiger enables automated compliance analysis based on client data.

Abstract

Despite recent advances in communication and automation, regulations are still written in natural-language prose, subject to ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness. How can we craft regulations with precision? Our solution is embodied in Eiger, a domain-specific programming language embedded in Haskell. A domain expert pairs with a software engineer to write regulations in Eiger. The domain expert needs only to read and audit the code, but not write it. A first, limited, user study suggests that this works well in practice because Eiger code mostly looks like Excel formulas with simple SQL queries. Eiger forms the kernel of a new strategy to deliver value to clients in our professional services business with increased automation and precision. The framework is executable: based on client data, we can use Eiger both to deduce how best to adapt to a new regulation and then maintain compliance. This paper reviews the design of Eiger and walks through its implementation. To preserve a straightforward surface syntax but with monadic semantics, we have leveraged advanced features, including GHC.Generics, the new OverloadedRecordDot extension, and a novel approach to performing class instance selection at run-time.