Legal Patterns Implement Trust in IT Requirements: When Legal Means are the "Best" Implementation of IT Technical Goals

The traditional approach of computer scientists to Law is that laws (statutes, regulations, etc.) set the requirements, logicians and requirements analysts model them, and finally IT technical solutions or organizational patterns are used to implement them. In this paper we try to answer a radically different question: Can a technical solution (e.g. a requirement in a security and dependability pattern) be implemented by legal means? We show how Legal Patterns, that represent the legal analogy of Software Patterns, can be formally used to implement trust relations required by security and dependability patterns.