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.
LIL Blog Posts
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Binoc: A Field Guide
Since its inception, LIL’s Public Data Project has taken on the complex problem of monitoring government data. Among the thousands of revisions to public datasets each day, most are unremarkable clerical updates: a hundred new rows here, a corrected timestamp there. But how can we distinguish a clerical update from a more substantive change? […]
July 7, 2026
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Local News as Public Data, Then and Now
The following remarks were delivered at the National Summit on Local News Preservation on June 17, 2026.
June 25, 2026
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An Open Hardware TPU on Your Desk
The open-source movement emphasizes the power of freely modifiable, flexible code to support transparency, collaboration, and building outside vendor lock-in. Open hardware extends that logic to the physical layer: chips you can read, modify, and build on. All software runs on hardware, and over the past few years, the ground under the hardware industry has
June 16, 2026