Insights

Seventeen common claims made by supporters of the Senate permitting bill (BAAJA, S. 5653), each checked against the 417-page text with page and line citations: what they get right, what they leave out, and what they overstate.

How Act 9 and Act 16 divide pipeline siting, how safety oversight works, and what the July 2026 Line 5 ruling requires. Includes original documents, a detailed report, and two videos.

A visual guide to PA 233: size thresholds, the local and state processes, setbacks, project commitments, and the May 2026 court ruling. Includes a detailed report and two videos.

From railroad regulation to today’s three-member Commission: its history, current commissioners, appointments, political structure, utility decisions, and public participation. Includes a detailed report and two videos.

Who chooses a transmission route, who pays for a large load, and how residents can participate. A visual guide to Act 30 and the MPSC's broader work, with a detailed report, two videos, case explorer, and primary sources.

Michigan House Bill 5940 would end the rule that power lines along limited access highways must be buried, but four public bodies still have to act before any overhead line goes up, with no deadline for any of them and no new say for neighbors or townships. The change word for word, the path from law to line, a county table, the Senate package, and what township boards, county officials, and property owners in communities such as Williamstown and Locke can do before the MPSC's October 21, 2026 comment deadline.

A 132-page, section-by-section reading of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAAJA, S. 5653): what the Senate permitting bill actually says, what it changes in federal law, and who wins and loses, cited to page and line — with a tested answer to whether it is a data-center bill. Full report PDF and companion videos.

An independent analysis of the September 30, 2026 Senate permitting deal: expanded federal power to approve power lines and take land, narrower court challenges, data center costs left to utility estimates, and no emissions limit — with Michigan worked examples and how the bill reaches other states. Full 40-page report available for download.

An independent evidence review of Oracle's $43.1 billion tax abatement application under Michigan Public Act 198: the statutory six-month commencement rule, the county's own permit record, the consent judgment, principal findings, and recommended actions — revised July 18, 2026 after the Township Board's July 14 and July 17 votes, with the full 46-page report available for download.

An independent, reproducible route and environmental analysis of ITC's seven published alternatives for the Oneida–Sabine Lake 345 kV line in central Michigan — scored on the Act 30 factors with and without House Bill 5940's freeway credit, stress-tested across a million weightings, and resolved township by township. Revised September 2026; full 41-page report and explainer video.

A public-data traffic analysis of the proposed Bears stadium at Arlington Park: roughly 32,000 game-day vehicle trips, 112 local-street bottlenecks that persist in every mode-share scenario, the Metra surge-service gap, and equity concentration on the impact corridors — with five adoptable recommendations. Full 55-page report available for download.

An analysis of the EU AI Office's draft General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, highlighting systemic risk oversight, documentation requirements, incident response, and board-level compliance considerations.

A primer for board directors on the AI lifecycle — data collection, training, and deployment — and the strategic considerations boards must understand for effective AI oversight.

A framework identifying the five key sources of AI governance requirements for boards — legal mandates, risk frameworks, insurance, internal policies, and customer preferences.

A comprehensive guide for board directors on leading AI risk management through six key elements: establishing context, risk assessment, risk treatment, recording, communication, and continuous monitoring.

Inside the KL3M Data Project — assembling 132M+ copyright-clean documents to enable responsible LLM training and earning the first 'Fairly Trained' certification.

An exploration of data provenance — the origin and history of data — and why it is a board-level concern for AI risk management, legal compliance, and responsible governance.

Introducing an open-source Responsible Data Science Policy Framework designed to help organizations address ethical AI governance through a modular, adaptable approach.

A retrospective on the firm's journey from early-stage consulting through the LexPredict era, and the pivot toward AI governance, privacy, and institutional advisory.

Key takeaways from building, scaling, and successfully exiting LexPredict — an AI-powered legal technology company acquired in 2018.

How our machine learning research achieved breakthrough results in predicting Supreme Court decisions, and what it means for the future of legal AI.

Open course material for Complex Systems 530 at the University of Michigan, covering agent-based, Monte Carlo, and network modeling in Python.

Introducing our Supreme Court prediction project using extremely randomized trees to forecast over sixty years of decisions and individual justice votes.

Sam Arbesman featured our paper on measuring legal complexity of the United States Code on his Wired Science blog, the Social Dimension.

An analysis of whether the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26) is actually the longest Title in the U.S. Code, using data from our paper on measuring legal complexity.

Releasing our empirical framework for measuring legal complexity, applied to the U.S. Code, with full replication source and data on GitHub.

A reference guide to the community detection algorithms available in igraph 0.6, including their runtime complexity, and support for directed and weighted edges.

A step-by-step tutorial for building a fully searchable AWS CloudSearch domain using public domain U.S. Supreme Court decisions, covering data acquisition, domain configuration, indexing, and querying.

An introduction to an automated daily analysis of 112th Congress bills, providing statistics on section count, word count, unique words, and Flesch-Kincaid reading level for every bill.

A technical deep-dive into the architecture of the Legal Language Explorer, a Google Ngrams-style viewer for the U.S. Supreme Court corpus, combining redis (noSQL) for fast time series queries with PostgreSQL for case-level drill-down.

An introduction to three paradigms of legal informatics — 20th century computers-as-libraries, 22nd century computers-as-lawyers, and the practical 21st century middle ground.

A demonstration of historical data mining techniques using editorially-assigned legal headnotes from U.S. Supreme Court cases, examining co-occurrence and citation networks to trace the evolution of legal concepts like criminal suspect rights.

Announcing two working papers released on SSRN: one measuring European integration through sovereign bond yield correlations from 1872 to 2010, and another exploring the network structure of legal concepts in Supreme Court headnotes.

Announcing the publication of an empirical analysis of U.S. Tax Court citation practices from 1990 to 2008 in the Virginia Tax Review, examining Internal Revenue Code citation frequency and the impact of tax legislation on court decisions.

An introduction to indexing and searching the U.S. Code using Apache Lucene, structured public domain data, and open source software.