Law Underground

Law Underground

Law Underground is a web-based, non-profit legal information project, the goal of which is to make technical knowledge of the law more accessible to the general public.

Volunteer lawyers and law students can contribute content to Law Underground's knowledge base, in a Wikipedia-like collaboration. The system uses this content to produce dynamically-generated interviews for users. At the end of each interview, the applicable legal principles are presented and explained, free of extraneous and confusing information.

From a technical point of view, Law Underground is a rule-based legal expert system. Lawyers and law students add legal knowledge in the form of if-then rules, which can reflect statutory principles, case holdings, or other legal doctrine. The program's inference engine uses these rules to ask users questions and to draw conclusions based on the user's responses. The rules are jurisdiction-specific, so users do not have to be burdened with legal principles that do not apply to them.

Law Underground is an example of a Web 2.0 project that merges collective intelligence and artificial intelligence technologies. The software's state of development is currently alpha.

Law Underground is motivated by the inequality in access to legal information, which is a worldwide problem. Legal information is generally available in proportion to a person’s economic resources, which means that often those who need it the most have the least access to it. Law Underground seeks to help redress this imbalance by redistributing legal knowledge from those who have it to those who need it. Because the project's goal is to create a public good, the site's content is subject to a Creative Commons license.

Law Underground, Inc. is a non-profit organization located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

External links

* [http://www.lawunderground.org Law Underground home page]


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