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

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 archivists at Harvard’s la... Read More

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 the risk the schema will crumple unde... Read More