Rule of Law

The bench — the rule of law, applied without bias

I began my career clerking for two chief judges — one on a state appellate court, one on a federal district court. There I watched the rule of law applied as it must be: faithfully, on the record, and regardless of any judge’s personal preference. A ruling had to follow from the law and the facts — not from who stood before the court. That is the rule of law in its purest form, and it set the standard for everything I’ve done since.

The bar — the rule of law, in defense of rights

For more than a decade as a complex-litigation lawyer — and later as a cybersecurity and digital-forensics lead — I invoked the rule of law to uphold my clients’ rights. Litigation is where abstract principle becomes concrete protection: a contract enforced, a right vindicated, a wrong made whole. Arguing the law, day after day, taught me that the rule of law is only as strong as our ability to find it, read it correctly, and apply it consistently.

The corpus — the largest body of law on Earth

I then sought out the largest corpus of law I could find — every case, statute, and regulation — ultimately helping build systems that span the laws of more than 100 countries. Seeing the whole corpus at once changes how you think about it: law is not a static rulebook but a vast, living, contradictory, constantly-changing body of human values, written down. German values differ from Texas values; both are encoded in their law. To serve the rule of law at that scale, the law itself has to become legible to machines.

Parsing the law — making it computable, so it can be enforced

For the last ten years, my work has been to parse that law — to make it computable. With the open-source SALI / FOLIO standard (which I led for five years, growing it from ~1,000 to 18,000+ tags), the law becomes a deterministic, queryable knowledge graph of rights, obligations, and prohibitions. The point is not novelty for its own sake; it is enforcement. When the law is computable, it can be better interpreted and more faithfully applied — by lawyers, by in-house and corporate counsel, by arbitrators, and by the courts themselves.

Doing this well means tracking the law as it moves: which holdings have been overturned, which statutes amended, how new law evolves on top of old. A decade of that work gives me a rare, structural view of law as a living system — and a tested ability to parse it, interpret it, and communicate why the rule of law matters to the very stakeholders charged with disseminating and enforcing it.

Standing up for the rule of law

The rule of law is not only my craft — it is a conviction. When constitutional norms came under strain in January 2026, I drafted and organized an open letter supporting the rule of law — signed by more than 650 lawyers, judges, and legal technologists, across geographic and political lines. It opens with a simple affirmation: “We support the rule of law.” It then says what is at stake for everyone who works in or relies on the law:

If the rule of law is ignored, then legal advice loses meaning. Legal tech loses value. If the powerful can disregard the law with impunity, then our legal analyses, compliance programs, and contract drafting become performative exercises: accurate but irrelevant.

Democracies don’t legitimate force by outcome; democracies legitimate power by process, principles, and accountability. … Without the rule of law, businesses lose value. And the world becomes poorer.

We closed with the conviction I hold most deeply: “Because without the rule of law, our lives — our work, our institutions, and our society — all lose value.” That is the same conviction behind everything above — and the reason I want to help build AI that is legal by design.

Where the rule of law meets AI

A capable AI system, acting across jurisdictions, will routinely brush against the law — and each law encodes a jurisdiction’s human values. So aligning AI to human values includes aligning it to human law. Today that same mission — making the law legible and enforceable — is exactly where the rule of law meets AI. It is the work this role calls for, and the work I’ve been doing, in public, for years.