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

How can formalizing regulations as computer code help us check whether the regulations satisfy reasonable policy objectives? Computer science researcher (and Catala creator) Denis Merigoux has tried to answer that question with a project called MLang. As Merigoux explained more fully on his blog, this project became possible because the French g... Read More

The purpose of the API I created at authorityspoke.com is to take provisions of the US Code and Constitution that have been published in XML by the US government, extract their headings and content, and then serve those as JSON in response to web requests. So a question that a prospective user might ask is, why download laws as JSON when they’re... Read More