This blog post was inspired by a paper presented at ICAIL 2025 by Josephine Dik and Réka Markovich, called “Judicial Discretion as Normative Reasoning: Deontic Characterization of Judicial Decision Making with Answer Set Programming”. It describes the use of the clingo Answer Set Programming (ASP) solver to weigh various considerations in a hypo... Read More

At the 2025 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, I was very impressed by a demonstration of CATLEX, which includes LLM-assisted extraction of legal doctrines, and a flowchart-like view that diagrams a court’s legal reasoning process in resolving a legal issue. CATLEX relies on a corpus of disability-claim decisions issue... Read More

I tried out the CollateX Python library to see if it seems useful for visualizing similar text passages about legal doctrines, especially caselaw. I used a very simple example dataset consisting of a holding from Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (the opinion that abolished Chevron deference) and two passages from later opinions restating the... Read More

In June I was lucky enough to be sent to Braga, Portugal to represent Cornell Legal Information Institute at the 19th ICAIL conference (International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law). The core of this conference is an academic community rooted in knowledge-heavy AI approaches, many of them with lineage extending back at least to th... Read More

I’ve released version 0.9 of AuthoritySpoke. In my last blog post about AuthoritySpoke, I wrote that I had decided not to migrate all its data serialization code to Pydantic. In this post, I’ll explain why I changed my mind and did just that. Basically, I became tired of the proliferation of messy data loading code in the AuthoritySpoke reposit... Read More