First International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law, RELAW 2008, Barcelona, Spain, September 9, 2008

Requirements engineering is the practice of identifying and specifying system requirements to achieve a specific purpose. Government laws and regulations are written to achieve societal goals, and thus have a direct impact on system requirements and designs. Engineers and regulators need methods and tools to focus the discussion of legal compliance in terms of observable criteria to ensure that systems comply with relevant laws. The First International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law was held in conjunction with the 16 IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference in Barcelona, Spain. The purpose of this workshop was to bring together researchers, lawyers and engineers to coordinate discussion on emerging issues in this area. This report summarizes the workshop structure, the paper discussions and break-out session that yielded important terminology and future research goals.