Welcome to the
Computer-Readable Legislation Project (CRLP)

At the States of Jersey’s Legislative Drafting Office (LDO) we have a Computer-Readable Legislation Project (part of the global “Rules as Code” initiative). It was funded from 2023 to mid-2025 and is now continuing on a volunteer basis.

For more, see About the project, Our work, and the Team. We also have a Substack blog.

Latest news - Drafter-friendly logic mapping tool - See our slides for CALC Belfast 2025, this demonstration video and interactive example and instructions for how a legislative drafter can put a draft provision into the interactive, free, web-based (no downloading needed) visualiser that our Singapore colleagues built for us.

  • The slides and video show how a legislative drafter can produce an if-then version of a draft provision, which can be automatically converted into L4 to produce a flowchart-like logical map that a reader can interact with to guide them through the legislation. This limited use of L4 is a way in which legislative drafters, with no technical knowledge (just the grammar, logic and paragraphing that they use every day), can produce working code that they and their policy officers could use to check drafts. That helps drafters to picture the potential benefits of using a fuller system - elsewhere on the same site you can see examples of L4 being used more fully, including for Jersey’s Charities Law.
  • For more on this see our slides for RaC Guild Sept 2025 (or here), & our Substack post (& earlier report). For the first half of 2025 we secured funding from the Jersey Legal Information Board to work with the Centre for Digital Law at Singapore Management University on several ideas to see what their L4 DSL (a “domain specific language” or DSL for law) can do with our project. SMU have finished their research, and L4 is now being taken forward by Legalese.

Farmer example as a draft and in L4 visualiser Farmer example as a draft and in L4 visualiser

You can also download the slides from our 25 July 2025 presentation to the Artifical Intelligence working group of the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel from the files in the AI section of our OSF site - “CRLP - CALC AI Working Group 25-7-25.pptx” (you should be able to use the 3 dots to download even if the slides do not display).

See also our outline plan and our presentation of some initial results at the CALC/PCC Perth 2025 conference on the work we have done with Word on hyperlinking definitions. We previously gave an interim summary our work with Singapore (slides available on our OSF site), and a demonstration video of using Excel and Singapore’s L4 on s1(1) British Nationality Act.

A diagram showing the if-this-then-that structure of a piece of legislation If-this-then structure of a provision

A highlighted offence provision showing its component parts Tagged components of an offence provision