Four years ago, Dan Katz and I began working on a project to measure the complexity of the law. Its genesis was, in every sense, an accident; in order to properly identify citations to the IRC in our VTR empirical review of U.S. Tax Court decisions, we had to deal with the informal, non-Blue
Live from ReInvent Law Silicon Valley, where I gave an Ignite-style talk drawing analogy to law's future from finance's past. Slides embedded below and video forthcoming:
In the last post on AWS CloudSearch, I provided a tutorial on the creation of a simple CloudSearch domain for Supreme Court decisions. This walkthrough described the steps of creating a domain, configuring access policies and indexing, populating the index, and using the search API. We were left with a functioning case search database.
When I put together my original post on the length and complexity of Congressional bills, I was hoping to build forward momentum on the project. The goal was to build a simple, sortable and searchable interface to explore and visualize the data. As usual, however, paying employers and consulting clients got in the way
Where would you go to find out what the longest bill of the 112th Congress was by number of sections (H. R. 1473)? How about by number of unique words (H.R. 3671)? What about by Flesch-Kincaid reading level (S. 475)? Head on over to this table of bills, updated daily for the 112th
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
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,
What do you do with that unfinished paper? You know, the one that's 50% there but you don't have the time to finish. Or maybe it's the one that's 80% there, but you don't want to deal with the inevitable two years of revise-and-resubmit. This problem gets even harder when you decide to leave academia. I
When someone brings up the empirical study of legal citation, most people think of the work Landes & Posner and Epstein & Martin. If you're really cool, you might even think of Dan and me, who have spent quite awhile analyzing and visualizing Supreme Court citations like those in the 3D 1080p animation below: These studies, including
As I mentioned last week, I'm excited to give a keynote in two weeks on Law and Computation at the University of Houston Law Center alongside Stephen Wolfram, Carl Malamud, Seth Chandler, and my buddy Dan from CLS. The first part in my blog series leading up to this talk will focus on indexing and searching
