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The State Decoded Aims to Make State Laws Accessible

State laws are written for and by attorneys. While that might make for a good legal system, it sure makes them hard for regular people to understand. There's code law -- what law books are full of --...

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'The State Decoded' Squeezes Rich Metadata Out of Boring Legal Codes

At first blush, state legal codes seem pretty simple. You've got titles, which are composed of chapters, which in turn comprise sections -- or something very much like that. It's a straightforward...

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How the State Decoded Makes Sense of Messy Real-World Data

Those of us who deal with big data have a tendency to describe working with it in cavalier terms. "Oh, I just grabbed the XML file, wrote a quick parser to turn it into CSV, bulk loaded it into MySQL,...

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Bills Are Not a Changelog: Why You Can't Turn Legislation Into Laws

There is a common belief that since laws are the result of legislation, then surely one can automatically assemble an amended version of the code based on the bills that have passed the legislature....

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How to Decode State Law Histories

A rich source of information about laws is found in the history data that accompanies each law in most states, but you've probably never noticed it. For example, Virginia's Freedom of Information Act...

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The State Decoded Turns Laws Inside Out

Semantically, legal codes are smooth, shapeless balls of text. They're programmatically inaccessible, useless to software -- and most people. There's simply nothing on which to get a purchase. As...

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Decoding the SEO of Legal Questions with The State Decoded

Throughout the planning process for the State Decoded project, I have made the basic assumption that the primary source of traffic for the software would be from search engines. People typing in things...

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The State Decoded, Now Solr-Powered

The State Decoded project is putting U.S. state laws online, making them easy to search, understand and navigate. Our laws are organized badly, but The State Decoded is reorganizing them automatically,...

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The State Decoded Debuts Version 0.4

Version 0.4 of The State Decoded was just tagged on GitHub and bundled up for download, the result of six weeks of work. The State Decoded is a platform that displays state codes, court decisions, and...

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The State Decoded Adds Public API, Standard XML Format for Legal Info

Version 0.6 of The State Decoded is now available on GitHub. This release is a really exciting one -- it establishes a public API for State Decoded sites and creates a standard XML format for importing...

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