For drafting offices, publishers, and software teams
Test legislative transitions before they become publication defects.
With a concrete adapter, LawVM can consume a frozen drafting or publication export, run declared transition checks, and return source-linked failures without writing to the production system.
Checks
Use compiler invariants as editorial guardrails.
Target validity
Does every replace, insert, repeal, move, or renumber instruction resolve to the stated legal unit without a fallback search?
Mutation boundary
Did the proposed transition change only the intended target region and explicitly declared migration or recovery paths?
Temporal consistency
Are commencement, expiry, temporary provisions, version selection, and contingent triggers represented without impossible intervals?
References and expressions
Do citations still resolve, and do required language expressions expose corresponding structures, dates, and selected invariant facts?
Invariant and disposition
Guardrails produce review evidence.
An invariant is a named property checked over a declared export, source profile, and transition scope: target validity, mutation containment, temporal consistency, or expression structure. It establishes only that property when its checker is wired and its inputs are complete.
| Mode | Failure or result | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Strict-blocking | A failed check blocks the scoped result or promotion. | Use only when the profile names the guard, production path, and owner. |
| Observe-only | A finding is recorded in the report. | The finding enters human review while publication follows the institution’s existing rule. |
| Source-readiness | A source, identity, or coverage prerequisite is missing. | Return a blocked-source map; do not call the comparison clean. |
Current UK boundary: the UK lane is a bounded workbench with source, manual-compilation, and comparison-data limits. Its current invariant and effect diagnostics are observe-only or target-specific; LawVM makes no universal UK publication gate or broad official-consolidation claim.
Artifact boundary
Integrate through versioned exports.
A check becomes an assurance result only after the export's source identity, scope, and coverage are declared and pinned. Missing source closure is a blocked readiness result, not a green publication check.
Inputs
A versioned AKN/XML/JSON or publisher export, before state, proposed changes, effective-date metadata, and expected after state.
Outputs
Target-resolution failures, mutation receipts, reference findings, temporal findings, language-expression gaps, and a reproducible report.
Human role
Drafting-office or publisher experts define local instruction semantics, authority, and which failures block publication.
First scope
One export format, three recurrent operation families, a pinned transition corpus, and no production writes.