Analyzing 760,000 U.S. federal cases (1790–2024), researchers found common law evolves through constant experimentation—90% of new doctrinal clusters vanish within twenty years.
Law firm rankings typically prioritize prestige over results. This group analyzed 60,540 US civil lawsuits using the Bradley–Terry model, treating each case as a competitive game. Their outcome-based ranking significantly outperforms reputation-based systems in predicting litigation success.
This group studied 112,312 civil lawsuits in U.S. District Courts, finding that while cases are randomly assigned, judge biographical features and early-career citation records predict decisions with 65%+ accuracy. For 6-8% of judges, extraneous factors significantly influence rulings across all cases.
Designing Online Courts: Institutional Models for Digital Justice
Augmented Legal Practice
This project examines how judicial systems can evolve to meet rising expectations for accessibility, responsiveness, and fairness in a connected world.
Detecting Deceptive Behavior in Court Hearings and Cross-Examinations
Augmented Legal Practice
We are developing an automated system that retrieves and analyzes evidence related to claims made during hearings and cross-examinations across extensive collections of legal documents. It also identifies potential deceptive behavior in witness statements, supporting legal professionals in efficiently evaluating testimony and case records.
Neuro-Symbolic AI for Regulatory Compliance: The ComplianceTwin Pilot
Legal Analytics
This project examines how neuro-symbolic AI can be used to support explainable, auditable, and scalable regulatory compliance across complex organizational and ecosystem contexts.
The Functional Intentionality Test (FIT): A Behavioral Framework for AI Intentionality and Accountability
Computational Law
The Functional Intentionality Test provides a standardized, behavioral method for evaluating when AI systems exhibit purpose-like conduct. By operationalizing intent into measurable indicators, FIT enables regulators, developers, and auditors to classify AI systems, strengthen accountability frameworks, and avoid metaphysical debates over consciousness or personhood.
The Path to the Appellate Bench: Institutional Incentives and Judicial Performance
Legal Analytics
This project constructs a large-scale dataset linking judicial case outcomes, citation impact, and other competence-based variables across U.S. federal courts to study what drives judicial promotion. By quantifying competence, ideology, and professional networks, it aims to disentangle merit-based advancement from political or structural bias in the judiciary.
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are being developed into infrastructure for the regulation and distribution of data, rights, and obligations. This form of utility, wrapped in business logic, has meaningful implications for various enterprise use cases.
The insurance ecosystem today is fundamentally a world of contracts – contracts between insurance companies and insurees, contracts between insurance companies and contractors, and contracts between insurees and contractors. The sheer number of contracts and their complexity make it difficult for the parties in this ecosystem to function optimally.
The Computational Law Report is an agile, new media online publication that explores the ways that law and legal processes can be reimagined and engineered as computational systems.
Computational law is a branch of legal informatics concerned with the mechanization of legal analysis (whether done by humans or machines). Deriving from it, the “Computational Antitrust” project at Stanford University Codex Center explores how legal informatics could foster the automation of antitrust procedures and the improvement of antitrust analysis.
Corpus Legis is an evolving library of governmental regulations encoded in computable form. The long-range goal is a comprehensive collection of legal rules across multiple areas and multiple jurisdictions — federal, state, and local.
CodeX collaborates with it's affiliates to pursue a wide range of research projects.
A Legal Informatics Approach to Aligning Artificial Intelligence with Humans
Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities are rapidly advancing, and highly capable AI could cause radically different futures depending on how it is developed and deployed.
Access to meaningful justice, justice that is competent, affordable and achieves pragmatic outcomes, is missing in the U.S. Fact patterns that drive people and small businesses to seek the services of lawyers repeat daily.
How can key existing accepted business and legal frameworks for web-based transactions and intermediaries be operationalized at the interface with agentic AI systems in a way that avoids or mitigates risk, ensures accountability, and yields predictable legal outcomes when harms arise?
The Blockchain Education Initiative recognizes both that blockchain will be an important component of the legal, technological, and cultural landscape, and that engineers (technology builders) and lawyers (technology users) have related but different concerns. To that end, it aims to fill an important gap in the current blockchain ecosystem: legal education.
As climate and sustainability markets and regulatory environments continue to evolve, the legal profession has a central role to play in shaping new legal frameworks, including the role of leading edge technologies, supporting compliance and managing climate risks. Law x Climate explores the challenges and opportunities facing in-house and outside counsel for companies, public sector lawyers and legal scholars in this dynamic global landscape.
This project investigates how deterministic AI technologies like computational law, probabilistic AI technologies like deep learning, and other technologies can be combined to solve legal reasoning tasks better than using one of these technologies alone. Combining these systems allows us to benefit from their different strengths while compensating for their weaknesses.
Computational Linguistics and Effective Legal Drafting
Multiple academics, commentators and entrepreneurs have noted how technology can be used to automate tasks currently performed by lawyers. Instead of automating legal work, I intend to focus on augmenting legal work.
The goal is to demonstrate that, similar to what the Human Genome Project has shown, corporate behavior can also be identified, mapped, and literally codified in its own language based on publicly available information.
What’s the future of law when tech-enabled legal marketplaces and networks are better at deploying talent than traditional firms? Legal.io provides marketplace infrastructure to legal service enterprises to coordinate talent, […]
Social, economic and political complexity have manifested in increasing levels of legal complexity. While legal systems have to find ways to handle this increase, technology and data science can help further the understanding of their performance and provide them with much-needed tools.
Countless legal orders are created and processed every day. Nonetheless, the options to generate, serve, file, and respond to these orders remain largely manual, notably lagging other advances in legal technology.
Contact Information Ian Schick, Ph.D., Esq. ian.schick@specif.io Riyanka Roy Choudhury rchoudhury@codex.stanford.edu RELATED ORGANIZATIONS CodeX The proposed research centers on the thesis that machine-generated first draft documents can and will […]
The RegTrax initiative is a response to the increasingly complex and uncertain regulatory environment in jurisdictions across the nation and the globe. Particularly in the absence of any comprehensive or […]
Reimaging a Living, Breathing Constitution for the Digital Age
I have been approached by citizens from a war-torn, authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic nation to prepare a forward-looking constitution in hopes that these citizens may establish a break-away nation-state founded on principles of democracy, pluralism, and secular liberalism.
The Value of Blockchain and Its Impact on Business Models, Law, and Society
Blockchain technology, which underpins all cryptocurrencies, has potential greater than just as a medium of exchange or storage of value. Olga V. Mack interviewed CEOs, founders, and executives that will be affected by blockchain’s imminent arrival
System-2 reasoning refers to the type of thinking that is slow, deliberate, logical, and effortful, as opposed to System-1 reasoning, which is fast, automatic, and intuitive.
