Inspiration
The US Code is the collection of all the laws, statutes, and regulations that are in effect at any given time in the United States. The collection, as one might imagine, is extremely bloated, highly technical, and difficult to navigate particularly for those without technical legal training.
What it does
We built a platform that offers accessible and user-friendly legal resources and information. In order to increase civic participation via understanding the legal system and the federal laws in effect, we designed a web app that allows users to easily search the entire US Code and receive clear and concise AI-generated summaries of various sections that are far easier for the general public to consume. Users are then able to see relevant bills being voted on, as well as access definitions of words that still may not be familiar to our users.
How we built it
The frontend is a React web app built in NextJS while our backend uses FastAPI.
Challenges we ran into
As mentioned, the US legal code is very convoluted and difficult to parse. There doesn't exist a particularly good data set consisting of all 55000+ sections of the US Code so we had to build our own dataset which took a lot of time in order to navigate through all of the quirks the US Code threw at us.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to build a tool that allows the average person to truly understand the laws that they are governed by, which previously could only be done by those with legal training or those who could afford to hire lawyers. Our project has thus expanded access to civic education and participation to a new category of people that includes low-income communities and non-native English speakers who likely struggled to stay informed and participate in productive discussions on legislation.
What we learned
We learned the legal system is extremely complicated and near impossible for the average person to understand. This blocks large swathes of people from participating in the civic process and learning about their privileges and obligations as citizens.
What's next for Atlas Law
The next step is expanding the reach of the project by adding state laws to our corpus. We'd also like to implement a comparative feature that shows how certain issues vary from state to state across the country. For example, something unique about the United State's legal system, is very often things are legal in certain states and illegal in others. We would also like to enable our users to easily create and sign petitions, communicate with their representatives, and engage in advocacy for their community,
Built With
- fastapi
- javascript
- nextjs
- pinecone
- python
- react
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