System and methods for manipulating rights expressions for use in connection with a rights management system include one or more tokenized templates. Each tokenized template includes one or more rights expression language statements and one or more tokens associated with at least one of the rights expression language statements. Further, the tokens can be place holders for data items or rights expression elements. The system further includes a license template module that creates the tokenized templates, and a license instance creation module that replaces at least one of the tokens in one or more selected license templates with one or more of the data items or rights expression elements to generate a license instance. Additionally, the system includes a license instance analysis module having sub-modules for validating and interpreting license instances, and a data parsing module for extracting data from created license instances.