Hey, everyone. I'm a self-taught coder who became a lawyer, who fell in love with the opportunities to use logic programming to do knowledge representation of laws, regulations, and the like, and who after 10 years as a lawyer went to get an interdisciplinary LLM in Computational Law. Finished that spring in 2021. Immediately afterwards spent a year working on the L4 language at Singapore Management University. Since last fall, I am the Director of Rules as Code at a Canadian federal government department. "Rules as Code" is a public administration, legislative drafting, and software development methodology that takes advantage.of isolated, machine-executable representations of relevant rules, as soon as possible in the process. The big problem with Rules as Code is the tools. The best (not the most popular) tools are based in logic programming, because of the structural similarities to how laws are written. But people who build apps seldom do knowledge representation in logic programming. And giving better tools to only the coders doesn't solve the knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem. So we need tools that are realistic for subject matter experts to learn, and use. On the basis that of a child can do it, so can a lawyer, I decided to try and build a user-friendly interface to the Flora-2 logic programming language based on Blockly, which came from MIT's work on Scratch. The result is www.Blawx.com. My ideas about the features that a domain specific knowledge representation and reasoning tool for law should have keep changing as I learn, as well as my understanding of the best practices for user-friendly development environments. I'm currently enamoured with the s(CASP) system, because I think answer sets and stable models with justifications have deep parallels in how law is read and understood. And automatic justification is an absolute necessity for trustworthy public systems, as is open source. I'm working on satisfying myself that s(CASP) is an appropriate target language, after which I will start redesigning Blawx to use it. I learned a lot about programming environment design from some FoP content recently, and I'm here to learn more, and be exposed to more and better ideas, particularly in the user-friendly interface design space. I am also eagerly waiting for the advent of the world's second big 3D programming environment, after Minecraft Redstone components. Looking forward to the learning.

This is utterly unlike anything I've done in the past, but very close to things I've been interested in for years but not known how to make progress on.

"Blawx" is one of the best names for anything I've seen in a long time, especially making use of a (previously unused, I assume?) 5-letter domain. Anyway, godspeed on your mission, it can't come soon enough. :)

@Andrew F That's very kind, thanks. Yeah, I was surprised when the .com was available a few years ago.

I can't quite get blawx to do anything. Do you have a video demo or anything like that? I'm not a lawyer, so I'm particularly curious about how it would fit into a lawyer's workflow. Are they moving blocks around and getting auto-generated contract text out? Or something else?

It's possible the back end has crashed. I'll take a look. Thanks for letting me know. There are some videos online... let me see if I can find one.

@Jason Morris Welcome! I spent much of the last decade with at least a foot in the legal tech space, working on everything from eDiscovery to contract review and whatever else. A little while ago I decided to sit down and get my thoughts together on what I’ve seen in the industry, where it falls short etc. You might find it interesting, or at least amusing: https://danielkrasner.com/files/E-drudgery.pdf (The working example is eDiscovery but the general argument really applies to all of legal tech, and really much of business geared software out there.)

That is a very compelling note, Daniel, thanks! Love to chat more about it. Will get back to you later today.

anytime, glad you liked it

I just wanted to say, that I appreciate the focus on the mental processes of the person. That said, human beings are extremely flexible devices. We can, if we are motivated to do so, learn how to use tools of considerable complexity, as long as the learning curve is not too steep. In a lot of cases it is not that the tool is badly designed, even in the hands of an expert user. The problem is often that there is no way that a person who is not already an expert can have any intuition of the ROI on becoming one, and the curve is too steep to make the first steps look valuable.

The latter is more of a conversation about computing a medium of thought, malleable environments, and so on which is not the theme of the writeup. Plenty of that talked and done about by say Alan Kay if you want to go back to Scratch/Squeak and all that. The billable hours model, is also another conversation. It’s a terrible model for law, but note there is nothing here about efficiency (corrosive word in general) and nothing to say that it would be undermined. In my experience it does quite the opposite, since it pushes the time to higher billers. Nothing good about that, but it fits the bill. But this is really about tech, not legal.