Putting the pieces together: How the research fits in

As we’ve mentioned more than once recently, in 2020, Public.Resource.Org included LII in a five-year project to free the regulations of all 50 U.S. states. The first step was to conform the content to meet the standards set forth in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines so that they would be fully machine readable and therefore equally accessible to text-to-speech users as to visual website users. But that was just the beginning.

LII has always focused on helping people find and *understand* the law. In the early days, we enhanced understanding by showing the structure of and interconnections between legal texts. We later made progress on connecting legal texts to the real-world objects they address. Most recently, we have brought to bear emerging human language technologies to help simplify and summarize legal text.  

Members of LII’s engineering team participating in the Law-and-AI research project Fairness in Artificial Intelligence, led by scholars Kevin Ashley and Diane Litman, have been exploring techniques that provide alternate approaches to summarizing complex legal texts. We have also been working with students to refine the techniques we innovated for the CFR and research new approaches to address the much broader range of definition styles used across the dozens of departments of each of the 50 states. Taken together, these projects provide the next set of tools to help us increase understanding of state regulations — and all of the other legal texts we publish.