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

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 see AuthoritySpoke going next. I planned for Author... Read More

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 released by anyone so far. It seems to have incredibl... Read More

One of the most difficult AuthoritySpoke features for users to understand has been the ability for the Factors of legal rules to have “generic context” affecting how the rules can be compared to one another. This article will try to make that concept a little clearer, and also describe how to use contexts with comparison methods like .means(), .... Read More