We build open source tools used at Harvard and beyond that preserve and expand access to knowledge.
Learn more about the lab on the LIL website.
Our Projects
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Perma.cc
Perma.cc helps scholars, journals, courts, and others create permanent records of the web sources they cite.
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H2O Open Casebook
H2O is a platform for creating, sharing, and remixing open course materials.
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Caselaw Access Project
The Caselaw Access Project offers free, public access to over 6.5 million decisions published by state and federal courts throughout U.S. history.
Our Team
Read our staff bios on the LIL website.
Christian Smith
Software Engineering Manager
Christian discovered the craft of research when his open source work with cryptography led to academic collaboration and an engineering role at MIT. Years prior he witnessed the impact of technology on law as a student at Berklee College of Music, when dotcom era file-sharing networks disrupted the music industry. At LIL, he aims to empower the engineering team, help invent breakthrough library tools, and improve access to justice.
Research Fellows
- Katy Gero
- Jim Cowie
- Max Neely-Cohen
LIL Blog Posts
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Open French Law RAG: Using AI for Cross-Language Legal Information Retrieval
Imagine that you are an English speaker visiting France, engaged in discussion with a French local about a legal issue, but you are a novice French speaker and not familiar with the French legal system. Fortunately, you have a laptop containing over 800,000 French law articles, where the answer to your question may be […]
January 21, 2025
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Library Innovation Lab Announces the Launch of Institutional Data Initiative to Expand Access to Knowledge
Cambridge, MA – Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab (LIL) is proud to announce the official launch of the Institutional Data Initiative (IDI), a groundbreaking program helping libraries, government agencies, and other knowledge institutions share digital collections with their patrons while improving the accuracy and reliability of AI tools for all. First developed […]
December 12, 2024
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Adding Fresher Caselaw To Open Casebooks
This post relates to H2O Open Casebook, our tool for law professors to make open, remixable casebooks, and the Caselaw Access Project, our project to digitize the law of the United States. H2O Open Casebook makes the law fresher for students by letting professors teach from recent and relevant cases instead of […]
August 27, 2024