Lexon is a constrained legal language designed to bridge law, business, and code. Its goal is to make contracts simultaneously **readable by humans** and **executable by machines**, eliminating the traditional gap between legal drafting and technical implementation.
# Core Approach Lexon relies on a **controlled natural language (CNL)** model: grammar and vocabulary are deliberately restricted to avoid ambiguity. This ensures that contracts written in Lexon can be: - **Readable as prose** in multiple human languages (English, German, French, etc.) - **Executable as code** in digital environments, including blockchains - **A single source of truth**, rather than having separate legal and technical texts This design emphasizes **trust and transparency**: non-programmers should be able to verify what a contract will do without needing to read raw code.
# Jurisprudential Position Lexon represents a move from *Code is Law* to *Law as Code*. Its normative stance is that law should be **specified in computable form**. This embodies key jurisprudential values: - **Publicity and knowability**: Law must be legible to ordinary people (a principle stressed by Lon Fuller). - **Clarity and certainty**: Constraints on language aim to prevent interpretive ambiguity. - **Cross-border neutrality**: Lexon seeks to express obligations and rights without binding itself to a single jurisdiction’s legal system.
# Illustrations - **Contracts as executable prose**: A single Lexon text functions as both contract and smart contract. - **Blockchain deployment**: Agreements can be enforced directly on-chain. - **Multilingual clarity**: The same Lexon clause can render consistently in different human languages, reinforcing accessibility.
# Critiques and Challenges - **Legal system acceptance**: Courts may hesitate to treat Lexon as authoritative legal drafting. - **Expressive limits**: Constrained syntax may not capture nuanced doctrines like equity or proportionality. - **Context sensitivity**: Background legal norms may be lost when everything is expressed in executable form. - **Enforcement gap**: Real-world obligations (e.g. delivering goods) remain outside purely computational enforcement.
# Summary Lexon is a **practical experiment in Law as Code**. By uniting legal text and machine code into one constrained, transparent language, it pursues a vision of law that is at once **legible, legitimate, and executable**.