Reviving LinkedLegislation at linkedlegislation.org
Every few years, I rediscover blogging. I originally wrote posts on tabulaw.com in 2008, for my (then) novel idea to digitize legal research and writing. That was in the early days of Stanford’s Codex project, before Harvey, Casetext, and the million and one lawyer-engineers who have since trained and idealistically – most often quixotically – aimed to modernize legal work. Note to future innovators: The billable hour is dead (long live the billable hour).
After Tabulaw failed (c.f. efficiency is a costly strategy, as long as there are still billable hours; also see “99% of all legal content is still not 100%”), I moved the blog to linkedlegislation dot com. I worked on transforming legislative and regulatory content into a form that is more machine readable. That work led to the Comparative Prints project for Kirsten Gullickson at the Clerk’s Office at the U.S. House of Representatives, advances at the Office of Legislative Counsel (led by the visionary Wade Ballou) and advances in how the Law Revision Counsel classifies new laws and updates the United States Code (the web update is coming some day soon). The dedicated attorneys and staff of the Law Revision Counsel gave us access to their meticulous process and we co-created workflows that preserve the Counsel’s accuracy while producing a more structured (in XML) and searchable result. While I originally complained that the US Code was only publicly updated once every six years, it is now mostly up-to-date (partially thanks to Congress not passing any laws any more, but that’s another story… We worked closely with the whole office: Law Revision Counsel Ralph Seep (LRC), Deputy Counsel Rob Sukol (and a weekend musician and great dad, ז״ל), John Wagner (later LRC) and the new generation of Assistant Counsels.
I’ve given the new era of LLM-driven AI some time to settle in, and now I’m bringing the blog back at linkedlegislation.org. One of these days, I may give up, like everyone else and move to Medium or substack. But I would miss the day-long debugging sessions every few years to update Github Actions to publish to AWS S3, add a Route 53 zone (hello linkedlegislation.org), point my Namecheap DNS to the new Zone, create two CloudFront distributions (one for the main content and one for the linkedlegislation.org base url to redirect to blog.linkedlegislation.org) and then debug all of the origins, certificates and http/https choices in each of those AWS products. A special thanks to AWS, for helping me still feel like a hacker when Cursor and Antigravity can write more and better code than I can. The true Turing test is to set up a Jekyll site on AWS CloudFront, and I passed.