Sunlight Foundation

Earlier this week the annual Law Via the Internet conference was hosted by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University. The conference schedule featured talks on a range of policy and technical subjects, including the topic of extracting legal citations from text and understanding them programmatically, which arises whenever people need to determine the relevance of legal documents based on the authorities they cite. Recognizing citations in text is also a vexing but fun programming challenge, so I was excited to see this issue figure prominently in at least four separate talks.