Last August, I released an XML copy of the Michigan Compiled Laws (MCL). As an example of what could be done with the structured data, I also created a single-page HTML version generated from the XML. Since then, there's been significant activity in the state statutory arena; my favorite example is Virginia Decoded, a
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
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
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,
I've uploaded the slides for my talk today at the University of Houston Computational Law Conference. The purpose of the talk, in my own words, is: ... [to] present the set of frames through which I view the relationship between law and computation: "law as computation," "computation on law," and "law and computation." By distinguishing
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
Later this month, I'll be giving a keynote at a meeting on Law and Computation at the University of Houston. As part of the talk, I'm putting together an example of how I think machine learning and structured data can help build a better legal search engine. For the talk, I'll be building a subset
