On the infinite capabilities of a programmer - Law and the Judiciary

Before I get to my point, let me take you on a detour. I was having breakfast on the 1st of Jan with a bunch of friends, and one of the friends' niece. The niece just finished her 8th standard and is moving to the 9th. Every single person at the dining table was from a different career direction - an MBA, a physics student turned programmer, a graduate student studying ecology, an MBBS student and an engineer turned entrepreneur. And we were all talking to her about academics in general and about specific subjects like mathematics and science. Eventually, when it was my turn to talk, I just asked her to learn how to program. No matter what she decides to become, a doctor or an engineer, learning how to program will open new doors for her.

Now, let me get to my main point, which are the infinite new possibilities that arise from being a programmer. Programming is becoming an integral part of every profession and learning how to program will open doors that you didn't even know existed.

Case in point is how programming can be used to help Lawyers and the Judicial system. I came across this article on the need for a Google for the Law (http://www.openlawlib.org/blog/why-isnt-there-a-google-for-the-law/, which talks about how cumbersome the tools for case research currently are and how arduous and time taking it is to find relevant case law. The article goes on to talk about how the Open Law Library was working with various governments to modernizes the law drafting, codifying, and publishing process.

 I'm not saying that a lawyer should also be a software developer. What I am saying that being familiar with programming, instead of shunning it away completely, will make you ask such questions like the one above. And more. What use are questions you ask? Well, if you ask the right questions and if you have the initiative, it can become a lucrative business. The example here is the startup casetext (https://casetext.com/about), which develops and sells one such Google for the Law.

There are a lot more examples like this, where a field/industry has adopted programming to drive change. I'll write about such examples when I come across them.

I'd love to hear any comments or feedback that you have. I'd also love to hear if you have a similar story, of how you adopted programming to make your work life easier or fundamentally changed how things are done (at your workplace/in your industry).

Popular posts from this blog

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)
Read more