Machine-readable law
Legal material published in a structured format that software can identify and process.
ConceptSources & confidence: High confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Checked the definition, attribution and stated distinctions against the listed source passages.
- OASIS LegalDocML: Akoma Ntoso vocabulary, version 1.0
XML representation of legal documents, structure, identifiers and metadata.
What this check doesn’t establish
- This definition does not certify any particular dataset as complete or legally authoritative.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
Standards such as Akoma Ntoso represent legal documents in XML, marking their structure and metadata. Identifiers and references support software that locates provisions and relates documents.
A structured document is still a document. Machine readability does not by itself make a rule executable, resolve ambiguity, prove the legal effect of an amendment or produce an authoritative version for any date. Those depend on the encoded information, interpretation and maintaining institution.
In the essays
- For the Love of Law
Read the essay
Sources
- Akoma Ntoso
Discussed in
- Magna Carta (1297)
Discussed in
- R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467
Discussed in
- The Twelve Tables
Discussed in
- Why We Built CentreAI Codify
Discussed in
Projects
- Codify
Discussed in
Ideas
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/concepts/machine-readable-law.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-26