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 --...
View Article'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...
View ArticleHow 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,...
View ArticleBills 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....
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleDecoding 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...
View ArticleThe 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,...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleThe 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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