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If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.

elpakal 9d ago
> By using the legal search index, Astra for Law can search U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. Our work with Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, brings its case-law collection covering more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law (opens in a new window) into this research experience. Found that to be very interesting
- rayiner 9d ago
  CourtListener already has an MCP interface and Grok is quite good at pulling from it. In my experience, Grok 4.6 is quite good at analyzing legal cases and human-written documents. Better than Opus 5. I'm not sure if it's better than Fable 5.1 on that task, b/c I'm not willing to spend my precious Fable tokens on case law searches lol.
ericd 9d ago
Yeah, it should be freely available, you have to be able to know the rules you're supposed to obey in order to obey them well. I've been making a free API for US law search, you can point whatever model you want at it: https://law.agentlookups.ai/ https://law.agentlookups.ai/ Very much a work in progress, only federal and state so far, no municipal codes yet, and no case law yet. Big hole, I know. Also working on making the search ranking work better.
- manyatoms 9d ago
  is there a dataset/torrent with all the underlying laws?
  - ericd 9d ago
    Right now it's just a bunch of crawlers for the individual states. If there's interest, I could periodically stand up snapshot torrents or something. That something you'd be interested in? Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...
    - timschmidt 9d ago
      Not op, but that's a very interesting proposition. While the law and legal code are technically property of the people, I'm not aware of any single point of download for it all.
      - rayiner 9d ago
        There’s no single point of download for it all because there’s thousands of autonomous entities that issue law and adjudicate cases, at least 51 of them distinct sovereign entities.
        datsci_est_2015 9d ago
        We could enforce (suggest?) a common format / api at the federal level. Especially if it’s incentivized with funding that more than justifies the cost of maintenance. Similar to how federal interstate funding is only available to states with a 21+ drinking age.
        Something1234 9d ago
        Govinfo.gov is neat because you see the different attempts at common formats that have been attempted in the past.
        ericd 9d ago
        Yeah, going to the courts and municipal code seems like it's going to be a heavy lift. Many of them seem to hang off of municode, though, so maybe it's not a huge number of unique crawlers.
teiferer 9d ago
Let's swap it out for the AI cartel!
alansaber 8d ago
Legal search needs its own Arxiv. Nothing comes close.

> By using the legal search index, Astra for Law can search U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. Our work with Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, brings its case-law collection covering more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law (opens in a new window) into this research experience. Found that to be very interesting

rayiner 9d ago
CourtListener already has an MCP interface and Grok is quite good at pulling from it. In my experience, Grok 4.6 is quite good at analyzing legal cases and human-written documents. Better than Opus 5. I'm not sure if it's better than Fable 5.1 on that task, b/c I'm not willing to spend my precious Fable tokens on case law searches lol.

ericd 9d ago

Yeah, it should be freely available, you have to be able to know the rules you're supposed to obey in order to obey them well. I've been making a free API for US law search, you can point whatever model you want at it: https://law.agentlookups.ai/ https://law.agentlookups.ai/ Very much a work in progress, only federal and state so far, no municipal codes yet, and no case law yet. Big hole, I know. Also working on making the search ranking work better.

manyatoms 9d ago
is there a dataset/torrent with all the underlying laws?
- ericd 9d ago
  Right now it's just a bunch of crawlers for the individual states. If there's interest, I could periodically stand up snapshot torrents or something. That something you'd be interested in? Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...
  - timschmidt 9d ago
    Not op, but that's a very interesting proposition. While the law and legal code are technically property of the people, I'm not aware of any single point of download for it all.
    - rayiner 9d ago
      There’s no single point of download for it all because there’s thousands of autonomous entities that issue law and adjudicate cases, at least 51 of them distinct sovereign entities.
      - datsci_est_2015 9d ago
        We could enforce (suggest?) a common format / api at the federal level. Especially if it’s incentivized with funding that more than justifies the cost of maintenance. Similar to how federal interstate funding is only available to states with a 21+ drinking age.
        Something1234 9d ago
        Govinfo.gov is neat because you see the different attempts at common formats that have been attempted in the past.
      - ericd 9d ago
        Yeah, going to the courts and municipal code seems like it's going to be a heavy lift. Many of them seem to hang off of municode, though, so maybe it's not a huge number of unique crawlers.

teiferer 9d ago

Let's swap it out for the AI cartel!

alansaber 8d ago

Legal search needs its own Arxiv. Nothing comes close.