Dan and I recently released a new legal informatics project with a few colleagues. The project, which we've named the Legal Language Explorer, provides an interface similar to Google Ngrams Viewer for the U.S. Supreme Court. Unlike Google's viewer, however, the Legal Language Explorer also allows users to drill-down into case-level information for each n-gram.
Dan and I have written and spoken on legal informatics many times. Inevitably these conversations come to the same cut-and-paste list of informatics examples from legal search/retrieval and decision making. It's struck me that these examples fall into two categories. The first category sits firmly in the 20th century, while the second category belongs
Last night, I posted a copy of the Michigan Compiled Law (MCL) as an improved and structured XML document. As an example of what can be easily done with freely available, structured, machine-readable law, I've produced a single HTML file containing the entire MCL with table of contents, internal hyperlinks, and indentation. You can either
A few weeks ago, Ari Hershowitz posted on Quroa calling for a Californa code hackathon. Since Ari was drumming up support for software developers to build state-level tools, I thought I'd see what data the Michigan government had to offer. However, Michigan, unlike California, does not provide any bulk access to its Code. Access to Michigan
igraph is my preferred library for graph manipulation. The core library is written in C and is easy to extend, there are bindings to Python and R, and Gabor and Tamas are really nice and helpful guys. That said, I've always noticed that one stumbling block for users has been building the Python bindings with
Since there are always questions of support for newly released models, I thought I'd put up a post on Natty Narwhal on the new Dell Precision M4600. I got mine last week and have just finished replicating my M4500 setup on it. The only issue I've run into is for my Quadro. NV claims that
After struggling with Natty's multiple monitor support last week, I thought I'd test my luck again and try rotating screens. My current favorite monitor is the Dell P2411H, a sturdy little 24" monitor that has more degrees of freedom than you'd imagine possible. One of these degrees is the monitor's ability to rotate 90 degrees,
Have you been infuriated by Natty Narwhal's poor/broken support for multiple monitors (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6)? Do you believe that your CPU or GPU cycles should be used to actually do stuff, instead of making a window wobble and speeding the approach of thermodynamic equilibrium? Do you hate Unity anyway? Did you buy dual GTS
I've been busy lately with my new day job and wedding planning , but Dan and I still managed to meet two big goals in the past week. First, we've finalized a stable version of the Electronic World Treaty Index. This is a big deal in the world of international relations and international law,
Two weeks ago, I posted a pair of very rough working papers. The second of these, Exploring Relationships between Legal Concepts in the United States Supreme Court, opens up a number of interesting "historical data mining" techniques. I thought I'd go over an example of this today to demonstrate the usefulness of the approach. First,
