Audit surface: relations, functions, questions, lints

Vocabulary can be inspected structurally without running a single rule. This page documents the read-only audit surface: fourteen relations and nine functions over compiled packages, six catalogued questions, sixteen structural lints, and the command that runs them.

Two statuses apply here, and they answer different questions:

• What you can write: the relations, functions, questions, and lints are the supported LawQL language — available in the public release (S).
• What you can run: the ./law query command that executes them requires a source checkout (I). It is absent from the public release, so the commands below use the checkout launcher ./law from the repository root; see Before you start.

The full status legend is on the topic index.

Relations and functions

Fourteen relations expose the structure of compiled packages: nodes, edges, anchors, labels, positions, windows, imports, links, fields, literals, variables, rules, norms, and interpretations (S). Every row carries provenance back to the compiled nodes it came from. Nine functions complement the relations: seven structural string and label helpers plus two materialized readers over evaluation documents (S).

The structural layer answers equality and membership only — no arithmetic, no ordering, no recursion, no free negation. Scoping restricts a relation to one package or to a glob over the corpus.

Named questions

Six catalogued questions answer the everyday “who produces / who reads” queries (S). In English, with their parameters:

Question	Parameters	What it answers
anchors-of	node, pkg	Which pinned source fragments the node relies on: act, locator, and fragment of each anchor
imports-of	pkg	Which packages the package imports, with their pinned semanticHash
links-of	node, pkg	All typed links of the node: produces, reads, anchored, alias, subtype
producers	predicate, pkg	Which rules have the predicate as their head, with strength, polarity, and anchors
readers	predicate, pkg	Which rule, norm, and constraint bodies read the predicate (heads are listed by producers); a glob in pkg shows reads from other packages
type-step	type, pkg	One step of a subject’s type chain — an alias or subtype from the named type to its target; ask again with the result to take the next step

The catalogue itself prints its descriptions in Russian, the language of the project’s internal tooling. The listing below is verbatim, observed live 2026-10-03 (./law query --list, requires a source checkout):

Example

$ ./law query --list
anchors-of (node, pkg) — На какие закреплённые фрагменты опирается узел — акт, локатор и фрагмент каждого якоря.
imports-of (pkg) — Что импортирует пакет — имена импортированных пакетов и их закреплённые semanticHash.
links-of (node, pkg) — Все типизированные связи узла по отношению links — produces, reads, anchored, alias, subtype.
producers (predicate, pkg) — Кто производит предикат в пакете — правила с этой головой, их сила, полярность и якоря.
readers (predicate, pkg) — Кто читает предикат — литералы тел правил, норм и ограничений (головы исключены: их перечисляет producers); pkg может быть глобом, тогда видно чтение из других пакетов.
type-step (type, pkg) — Один шаг цепочки типов субъекта — alias или subtype от названного типа к цели; следующий шаг — тот же вопрос с полученным to и пакетом цели.

The same listing carries the sixteen lints below, for twenty-two catalogue entries in total. (./law query --list exits 0.)

Structural lints

Sixteen lints flag suspicious vocabulary and rule shapes without executing anything (S):

• strict-negative-head, duplicate-declaration-label, dangling-const-ref
• anchored-relation-without-executable, aggregate-head-without-key, achievement-open-window
• defeater-collision-without-direct-priority, defeater-head-variable-unless, same-side-priority-review
• deontic-action-in-premise, derived-maintenance-condition
• evaluative-fact-without-producer, evaluative-head-from-nonevaluative-body
• interpretation-without-group, strict-interpretation-consumer, strict-reader-of-foreign-defeasible-head

Running the lints requires a source checkout (I). The checkout build’s law audit command, run from the repository root against a project directory, runs the lint catalogue over a fresh snapshot as its form section. The public release also has law audit, but it ships no lint catalog, so its audit reports that section as not_run. Observed on the parcels interface fixture:

Example

$ ./law audit docs/corpus/lab/fixtures/parcels-iface
law audit labparcels.iface — formalization measure §33.1 (E-0249), profile static
CLIR lowered from sources (imports: deps); freshness: verified
levels not computed by this implementation: STRUCTURED, SEMANTIC

form (LawQL catalog lints on fresh snapshot, DECISION-0394): detectors 16, findings 0
dangling premises: 0 (unsupplied by package 0, enum variants in body 0)
one-way premises: 0 of 0 rules

Line by line: the header names the package and the measure profile; the second line says the compiled form was rebuilt from sources and is fresh; the third says two higher levels are not computed here. The form line is the lint section: sixteen detectors ran and found nothing. dangling premises counts rule premises that nothing in the package supplies. one-way premises counts strict rules whose single premise is derived and read by nothing else and whose conclusion nobody reads. Both are zero here.

Sixteen detectors, zero findings: the vocabulary has none of the suspicious shapes above. Use it after every vocabulary migration and before every review.

Inference queries

Beyond the structural layer, a query-over form compiles an ephemeral package and runs the evaluator over it, so authors can ask “what would follow if” questions without writing a throwaway package (S). The negative boundary — what the query surface refuses and why — is documented alongside the reference.

Where to go next

• The companion page on contracts explains the rules these lints enforce.
• The companion page on migrations uses this surface to confirm a move.
• For the full reference, see LawQL.
• For construct-level detail, see the Vocabulary construct reference.