Python for Law
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Serializing Legal Rules with Pydantic
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...
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Using the Caselaw Access Project API
The Caselaw Access Project is one of the two best resources for free programmatic access to American caselaw data (along with CourtListener). It has a great, user-friendly website, and thoughtful documentation aimed as several different audiences. And it has a more dramatic story than most legal tech projects, in which...
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Docassemble-L4: Deep and Meticulous Abstractions for Legal Rules
Creating a data schema for legal analysis involves plunging into abstraction. How deeply abstract the schema becomes probably depends more than we want to admit on the temperament of the person creating the schema. The more abstraction, the more powerful and expressive the schema can be, but also the greater...
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Design Notes: YAML and JSON Schemas in AuthoritySpoke
AuthoritySpoke version 0.7 is available on PyPI, bringing with it a new data input format using YAML files. For documentation on that feature, check out the just-published user guide or the API documentation. With this blog post I’ll go more into my reasoning in making the changes, and where I...
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Trying Out Eyecite, Free Law Project's New Case Citation Tool
Around the beginning of 2021, the Free Law Project extracted the code that it’s been using to link case citations within CourtListener, and released it as a new open source Python package called Eyecite. I think Eyecite could become the most widely useful open source legal analysis tool to be...