When an autonomous vehicle accelerates, yields, overtakes, or stops, it implicitly makes a claim: ‘this behavior is legal’. But how can we prove that claim across different legal frameworks and driving contexts? This presentation dives into the emerging concept of runtime traffic law evaluation: representing legislation as a structured rule set, evaluating it continuously in the vehicle and generating human-understandable compliance explanations. It will discuss the challenges of legal interpretation, conflicting constraints, country-specific variants and ODD-driven applicability. The result is a blueprint for building autonomous driving systems that are not only performant, but also transparent and legally accountable.

• What traffic-law compliance means for autonomous driving, and how it complements functional safety (FuSa) and overall system safety
• Why traffic law is a key scalability challenge for AD across countries, jurisdictions and ODDs
• How legislation can be translated into structured, machine-readable rule sets (legislation as code)
• How runtime traffic-law evaluation works in-vehicle to assess vehicle state and maneuvers in real time
• How to generate explainable compliance outputs (e.g. proof trees, logging) for engineers and regulators