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 have any... Read More

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 Py... Read More

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 tool’s author, but that doesn’t provide strong evidence that the t... Read More

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 in court opinions. That’s why most of the functions ... Read More

A few days ago, I began trying out OpenFisca, a fiscal policy simulation framework developed with backing from the French government. While OpenFisca describes itself as a “legislation-as-code” system to “Turn law into software”, I found that its approach to legal automation was different from the way I was used to thinking about the problem. Op... Read More