Python for Law
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Using Context to Automate Legal Comparisons and Explanations
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...
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Nettlesome: Simplified Semantic Reasoning in Python
I’m happy to announce I’ve published a new Python package called Nettlesome, for creating computable semantic tags that describe the contents of documents. When you browse through Nettlesome’s documentation, you’ll see a lot of concepts that look like refugees from logic programming, like Terms and Predicates. And yet Nettlesome doesn’t...
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Using Python Template Strings to Represent Legal Explanations
The AuthoritySpoke library provides you with Python classes that you can use to represent a limited subset of English statements, so you can create computable annotations representing aspects of legal reasoning and factfinding. In the newly-released version 0.5 of AuthoritySpoke, I’ve redesigned the interface for creating these phrases to use...
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A Test Rubric for Legal Rule Automation: the Beard Tax Act
As of late 2020, there are numerous software tools for formalizing and automating legal rules, but there’s not much of a standardized or accepted way to compare their abilities to one another. It’s one thing to see how a legal automation tool works on a problem set devised by the...
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Legislice: Exploring the Network of Statute Citations
Now that I’ve released version 0.3 of the Legislice Python package, it’s a good time for me to pause and explain how I envision this tool developing in the future. The original goal of the Legislice package is to share structured data about passages from legislation that have been interpreted...