Ninth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law

Over the past several decades, the software industry experienced tremendous growth in new infrastructure, business practices, products and services that use information to achieve stakeholder goals. Laws and regulations from governments impose compliance challenges for the requirements engineers seeking to build or maintain these information systems, including: balancing privacy and security, patient medical records, corporate governance, and ambiguity stemming from evolving regulations, technologies, and societies. Regulators, lawyers, engineers, and academics must address these challenges through a shared pursuit to understand the historical, social, and economic impact of laws and regulations on emerging technology. Importantly, these challenges are expensive, continuing, and rapidly changing. Regulatory compliance must be maintained, monitored, and measured throughout the life of regulated information systems.

The ninth RELAW workshop is a multi-disciplinary, one-day workshop that will bring together practitioners and researchers from two domains: Requirements Engineering and Law. Participants from government, industry, and academic sectors investigate challenges to ensure that information systems comply with policies and laws. The workshop will examine critical compliance concerns, including the processes for identifying relevant policies, laws, and jurisdictions; aligning system requirements with laws and regulations; managing changes in requirements or in the law; and demonstrating regulatory compliance through evidence-based mechanisms such as documentation, testing, and certification, even in the presence of uncertainty. This year, we will also explicitly focus on mechanisms for evaluating the social or economic value of efforts to ensure software systems are built to comply with the spirit as well as the letter of the law. To this end, we will accept short Vision papers describing how future work in requirements compliance achieves social or economic goals. These papers must be grounded in a particular system domain or legal domain. Although we will not expect final results or full validation of any research presented in Vision papers, we will expect submissions to be novel, feasible, and appropriate for submission at a conference within a year.To address emerging IT challenges in today's regulatory environment, RELAW will accept research papers submitted in two general categories: (1) research or experience papers up to ten pages in length and (2) vision papers up to six pages in length.