LinkedLegislation Blog

We're getting a lot of new sign-ups for the private beta of Tabulaw's legal research and writing platform.  Most of this was triggered by the review by Bob Ambrogi on his blog, LawSitesBlog.com, and word-of-mouth growth from there.  One of the results is that the new users have quickly found... [Read More]

This year, I hope politicians on both sides of the aisle heed professor Annette Nellen's advice to simplify tax law.  Nellen's article, for the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) highlights remarks by IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman on simplifying tax law.  Nellen provides a table showing broad agreement between the Commissioner's... [Read More]

In the battle between robots and legal experts, I have a stake in both camps. On the one hand, the site we're developing at Tabulaw, tax26.com, relies heavily on automated parsing of tax law information, in order to organize and display it intelligently for professionals.  On the other hand, this... [Read More]

What is the role of data in law?  I was trained as a scientist, so I have a tendency to look for evidence and falsifiable hypotheses in law and my daily life.  On this blog, I have discussed one aspect of data in law, the value of adding structure and... [Read More]

My current best answer: this html2text package from Germany.  It can be installed easily on a MacOS with Macports ($ sudo port install html2text), and on other Unix-like systems through their package managers.  It has a number of useful options, and I use it like this:html2text -nobs -ascii -width 200 -style... [Read More]