New on SSRN: Ariadne's Thread, a measurement-theoretic method for legal openness. Read the paper
Timeline

Chronology of ideas

Working drafts, essays, papers and frameworks in the order they first appeared. Dates are the dates of the underlying drafts or first publication, not of their import into this archive.

2025
  1. 4 Apr 2025
    draft

    Motion for Summary Judgment practice white paper

    A working white paper frames summary judgment practice as the problem of separating facts that can be proven from facts that legally matter, with evidence that survives admissibility challenges.

  2. 6 Apr 2025
    draft

    Admissibility validation white paper

    A companion white paper sketches a rule-graph approach to testing the admissibility of summary judgment evidence and anticipating the opposition's objections before filing.

  3. 14 Sep 2025
    draft

    Synthesis validation for the Twelve Bridges

    A working memo expands a four-bridge model into twelve legitimate bridges from precedent to conclusion, checked in parallel against a list of faulty synthesis patterns.

  4. 19 Sep 2025
    draft

    Burden-shifting taxonomy

    A practitioner's taxonomy catalogs 32 burden-shifting frameworks in American law and traces them to the nineteenth-century distinction between the burdens of production and persuasion.

  5. 29 Sep 2025
    draft

    Gray Area essay outline

    An outline sets out the distinction between shallow ambiguity, which more research can resolve, and genuine ambiguity, which it cannot.

  6. 9 Nov 2025
    draft

    Applied Computational Law and the taxonomy layer

    A survey of computational law since 1957 concludes that formal structure rarely scaled across broad litigation at the level of holdings and reasoning moves.

  7. 11 Nov 2025
    draft

    Gray area essay series

    A series of drafts develops a five-type taxonomy of genuine indeterminacy (semantic, normative, methodological, jurisdictional and analogical) for lawyers, AI and law researchers and law reviews.

  8. 11 Nov 2025
    draft

    Twelve Bridges article series

    Article drafts formalize the Twelve Bridges and name inferential hallucination: real authorities joined by invalid reasoning.

  9. 11 Nov 2025
    draft

    Burden-shifting article series

    Article drafts turn the burden-shifting taxonomy toward legal AI, including what the overruling of Chevron means for models trained on the old law.

2026
  1. 14 Feb 2026
    draft

    Discovery framework requirements

    A working draft argues that AI-assisted discovery is a strategy engine for building a constrained, sworn record, not a search engine.

  2. 15 Mar 2026
    draft

    ADR-Hard benchmark design

    A benchmark design shifts the test from fabrication to whether a system surfaces the proposition that does the legal work, at the right stage and with confirmed status.

  3. 20 Mar 2026
    draft

    Ariadne methodology paper

    A methodology draft replaces the ideal judge Hercules with Ariadne, who measures cross-posture dispersion instead of issuing a verdict.

  4. 2 Apr 2026
    essay

    Case Treatment Classification Guide

    A Medium guide answers whether a case can still be relied on, and to what extent, by classifying treatment at the level of the holding.

  5. 2 Apr 2026
    framework

    Case Treatment Taxonomy

    Treatment is classified by scope, severity and mechanism, on the rule that when in doubt it is better to over-flag than to under-flag.

  6. 15 Apr 2026
    paper

    The Promise Fulfilled

    An SSRN paper names five structural failures of document-level legal AI and distinguishes structural from opportunistic reliability.

  7. 17 Apr 2026
    essay

    Canons of Constitutional Interpretation of Planet Gibsonia

    A Medium thought experiment publishes a closed, layered set of interpretive canons for a fictional planet.

  8. 17 Apr 2026
    framework

    The Gibsonian Canons

    The Gibsonia canons become the governance layer for reading law as a versioned codebase.

  9. 17 Apr 2026
    essay

    Version Control for Law

    A Medium essay models enacted law as the main branch, opinions as signed commits, dissents as preserved branches and overruling as a gated force push.

  10. 17 Apr 2026
    framework

    Version Control for Law

    The Git model of legal interpretation is stated as a framework, pinned to the Gibsonian canons.

  11. 20 Apr 2026
    draft

    From Specification to Substrate and The Promise Fulfilled (journal drafts)

    Journal drafts develop the argument that the representation requirements of computational jurisprudence can now be met at corpus scale.

  12. 20 Apr 2026
    draft

    Building Hercules on Gibsonia and Method Before Power

    Two manuscripts argue that a new legal order can enact its interpretive constitution before it allocates power, and ask what that means for computable law.

  13. 21 Apr 2026
    essay

    The Four Laws of System Design for Computational Law

    A Medium essay sets out four precedence-ordered design laws and argues that a system violating any of them is defective as a matter of design.

  14. 21 Apr 2026
    framework

    The Four Laws

    The Zeroth to Third Laws are first stated: no unwarranted confidence, full explainability, grounding in validated authority, and testable, versioned reasoning components.

  15. 12 Jun 2026
    essay

    What a Best-in-Class Opposition System Must Actually Do

    A Medium essay argues that opposition is replacement, not response: the system must hand the court a better draft of its order.

  16. 12 Jun 2026
    framework

    Counter-Model Builder

    The requirements for an opposition system are stated around a board of the assertions a motion cannot win without and the current state of each.

  17. 15 Jun 2026
    experiment

    A tiny company of robots with house rules

    A multi-agent build with red lines reserved for humans shows that stopping an agent needs as much design as starting one.

  18. 20 Jun 2026
    essay

    What Remains for the Judge When the Machine Has Already Verified the Law?

    A Russian-language Medium essay separates mechanical legal verification from discretionary procedural calibration along four dispositional axes.

  19. 21 Jun 2026
    essay

    From the Supreme Court Machine to Ariadne's Thread

    A Russian-language Medium essay, written for the continental lawyer, tells how the project stopped building an ideal judge and began measuring whether a case has a single answer at all.

  20. 21 Jun 2026
    draft

    Summary Judgment as the Test Case

    A journal draft argues that Rule 56 supplies the completeness denominator that recall-side evaluation of legal AI has lacked.

  21. 26 Jun 2026
    program

    The Computational Law Institute launches

    The research program is published openly as six research programs, with frameworks, theses, a lexicon and a library.

  22. 26 Jun 2026
    essay

    Filing-grade research series

    A six-part practitioner series on filing-grade research opens with procedural posture as the failure no citator flags.

  23. 10 Jul 2026
    experiment

    We Ran a Blind eDiscovery Review with No Humans in the Loop

    A blind review run is reported with its failed gates alongside its results, and the review engine is open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license.

  24. 18 Jul 2026
    paper

    Ariadne's Thread

    Ross Brodskiy and Nathan Pokov post the paper that defines legal determinacy as measured dispersion across posture-instantiated adjudicators.

  25. 23 Jul 2026
    paper

    Detecting Genuine Doctrinal Ambiguity

    An SSRN paper presents a multi-layer framework for identifying structural indeterminacy in judicial reasoning.

  26. 28 Jul 2026
    paper

    isResponsive: An Open TAR Methodology

    An SSRN paper sets out an open technology-assisted review methodology for court-defensible responsiveness review.

  27. 1 Sep 2026
    paper

    Good Law for What?

    An SSRN paper replaces the question whether a case is good law with four questions about whether a proposition is usable.

  28. 1 Sep 2026
    framework

    Proposition-Usability Model

    A proposition is usable when it is still valid, governs in the forum and posture, helps the client, and has not already been rejected.

  29. 20 Sep 2026
    essay

    The Verification Layer Is a Smoke Alarm, Not a Building Code

    A Medium essay argues that citation verification is a legitimate but limited control and proposes architectural principles in its place.