Code is Law. Law is Code.

Legal texts matter to each of us every day. Ignorance of the law is no excuse; laws apply in every case. But legal texts are usually long and often complex. These problems are tackled by the Law Mining Hackathon, which will be held in September at the Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva. The hackathon opens up space for projects that make access to the law easier.

Good Law from Open Data, video lecture by John Sheridan, The National Archives.

Techniques that help us understand legal texts better and process them more efficiently are urgently needed. Everyone should be able to understand laws. Legal experts, for their part, should be able to advise those seeking help quickly and accurately. Sometimes, however, the law is a book with too many seals. Explanations by legal experts are expensive. And not everyone who has contacted a lawyer is particularly satisfied afterwards with the advice they have paid for. There is room for improvement in the way legally relevant information is handled.

The Law Mining Hackathon at the Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva takes on all kinds of openly available legal texts: legislation (provided by the state); agreements, terms of use for websites and the like (provided by private individuals); and judgments (published by courts or third parties). Anyone can take part in the hackathon, whether a software developer, a designer, a legal expert such as a lawyer or law student, an interested user or a legal layperson. The legal layperson in particular sometimes has quite different needs from the specialist; the involvement of a broad spectrum of people is indeed one of the strengths of such events. In teams, participants take on specific tasks and try to find workable solutions within a period of one to four days.

For example, finding methods for reducing the complexity of legal texts, using open source approaches to represent legal texts visually on the basis of established classifications, or using other openly available knowledge (e.g. Wikipedia) to work with legal code, as well as finding the most useful approaches for classifying legal texts for particular target groups (e.g. laypeople).

Whatever the participants set out to do and whatever they create, they are setting out to build the largely missing bridge between the law and the people affected by it.

More information and how to take part at make.opendata.ch/legal