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]


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужна курсовая?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • underground — index clandestine, covert, furtive, hidden, surreptitious, unobtrusive Burton s Legal Thesaurus. William C. Burton. 2006 …   Law dictionary

  • underground activity — index sedition Burton s Legal Thesaurus. William C. Burton. 2006 …   Law dictionary

  • Underground Atlanta — is a shopping and entertainment district in the Five Points neighborhood of downtown Atlanta, Georgia, United States, near the intersection of the MARTA rail lines. First opened in 1969, it takes advantage of the viaducts built over the city s… …   Wikipedia

  • Underground era of Christian metal — refers to the 1990s era of Christian metal movement when it was no longer in the spotlight of the mainstream media, and the many bands focused on the underground metal styles, the major ones being thrash metal, death metal, unblack metal, power… …   Wikipedia

  • Underground poker — rooms were most famously depicted in the 1998 movie Rounders, but existed long before and after the filmFact|date=August 2007. Historical New York Clubs Some of the longest operating underground clubs have been in New York City. Two of these, the …   Wikipedia

  • Underground economy — The underground economy or black market is a market consisting of all commerce on which applicable taxes and/or regulations of trade are being avoided. The term is also often known as the underdog, shadow economy, black economy or parallel… …   Wikipedia

  • Underground Railroad — This article is about the 19th century slave escape routes. For an article about railroads built below ground, see rapid transit. For the band, see Underground Railroad (band). Part of a series on …   Wikipedia

  • Underground (role-playing game) — Infobox RPG title= Underground caption= designer= Ray Winninger publisher= Mayfair Games date= 1993 genre= Science fiction, comedy system= Mayfair Exponential Game System (variant) footnotes= Underground is a satirical role playing game released… …   Wikipedia

  • Underground nuclear testing — Preparation for an underground nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site in the 1990s. Nuclear weapons …   Wikipedia

  • Underground storage tank — An Underground Storage Tank (UST), in United States environmental law, is a tank and any underground piping connected to the tank that has at least 10 percent of its combined volume underground. USTs, used to store petroleum, are regulated in the …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
… Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”