Python for Law
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Trying Out OpenFisca, a Tax and Benefit Simulator
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...
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MLang: Compiling Tax Regulations as Python
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...
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Serving US Legislative Markup Docs as JSON Using Django
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...
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Welcome
I’ve started this new blog to advance the idea that there should be a set of tools, interoperable with general Python data science libraries, for working with legal data and sharing legal analysis with Python. Learning Python gives you access to a better array of open source data tools than...