Visualize the Law

How do you visualize the law? The current ABA Journal profiles a number of people who are working on it. Robert Ambrogi, Visual Law Services Are Worth a Thousand Words—and Big Money.

ABA Journal cover
May 2014

The article leads with the recent Stanford grads who are developing Ravel (see our post here). Also featured is the creator of Law Dojo, a series of games to help learn the law. (Law Dojo was one of the apps discussed in our post on video games in legal education.)

Bob Ambrogi, the article's author, states: "it is in the area of legal research that it could have its most direct impact on the day-to-day work of lawyers and law students."  He highlights Fastcase, an online research system that features visualization tools, such as an interactive timeline that shows cases' influence and weight.

Fastcase interactive timeline, from Fastcase User Guide (2013 ed.),
available here. (The Gallagher Law Library does not subscribe to
Fastcase, but anyone can look around the website.)

For more of our posts on visualization tools for law (and related topics), see

• iPad App for Briefing Cases
• New Google Maps Gallery
• Visualizing Legal History with Google NGrams
• The Racial Dot Map
• Track what our legislators are up to with Capitol Words!
• Studying for the Bar Exam? There's an App for That!
• The Writer's Diet