Beyond Document Integrity: Auditing Resolved States of Formalized Legal Documents

RésuméAbstract

Hashing, signing, and timestamping establish that a document has not changed. When a legal document is produced by composition, from templates, clause libraries, shared definitions, and parameters that evolve independently, the governing text is a resolved state, and the integrity of the root document does not ensure that this state can be reconstructed. We treat this as a problem of ex post auditability. We define the resolved state as S_t = ρ(A_0, R_t, C_t), derive five properties of its auditability from requirements established in archival science, legal document standards, and norm-change formalisms, and introduce a capture model K_t with a diagnostic procedure that reports which properties a capture fails. We implement the framework in cmacc-attest and apply it to the 175 instantiated contracts of the CommonAccord library. References resolve in 96.6% of contracts, yet none is auditable: no reference is version-locked, and 98.3% contain conflicts settled by an unattested precedence order. Replaying 194 commits of the library history shows that 88.5% of the changes in resolved contracts left the root file unchanged. Repository history narrows reconstruction when the time of resolution is known, but does not replace a capture.

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@misc{sion2026beyond,
  title = {Beyond Document Integrity: Auditing Resolved States of Formalized Legal Documents},
  author = {Sion Israel Sion and James Hazard and Charlaine Bouchard},
  howpublished = {Zenodo (preprint)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23443043}
}

HistoriqueHistory

1. 2026-10-16Prépublication sur ZenodoPreprint on Zenodo