I have a new Jotwell review of Sarah Lawsky’s Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law. It is nominally a review of this recent (outstanding) article, but I used the occasion to go back through her recent body of work and introduce it to a wider audience who may not be aware of the remarkable nature of her project. Here are some excerpts:
Sarah B. Lawsky’s Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law offers an exceptionally thoughtful perspective on the automation of legal rules. It provides not just a nuanced analysis of the consequences of translating legal doctrines into computer programs (something many other scholars have done), but also a tutorial in how to do so effectively, with fidelity to the internal structure of law and humility about what computers do and don’t do well. …
Coding the Code, like the rest of Lawsky’s work, stands out in two ways. First, she is actively making it happen, using her insights as a legal scholar and logician to push forward the state of the art. Her Lawsky Practice Problems site–a hand-coded open source app that can generate as many tax exercises as students have the patience to work through–is a pedagogical gem, because it matches the computer science under the hood to the structure of the legal problem. (Her Teaching Algorithms and Algorithms for Teaching documents the app and why it works the way it does.)
Second, Lawsky’s claims about the broader consequences of formal approaches are grounded in a nuanced understanding of what these formal approaches do well and what they do not. Sometimes formalization leads to insight; her recent Reasoning with Formalized Statutes shows how coding up a statute section can reveal unexpected edge cases and drafting mistakes. At other times, formalization is hiding in plain sight. As she observes in 2020’s Form as Formalization, the IRS already walks taxpayers through tax algorithms; its forms provide step-by-step instruction for making tax computations. In every case, Lawsky links carefully links her systemic claims to specific doctrinal examples. She shows not that computational law will change everything, but rather that it is already changing some things, in ways large and small.