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.

For the first half of 2025 we secured funding from the Jersey Legal Information Board to work till June 2025 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. See this report (with links) on the interactive, free, web-based (no downloading needed) demonstration of the visualiser that our Singapore colleagues built for us, to see how a flowchart-like logical map can be used interactively to guide a reader through legislation. The version of the demo linked from the report shows a way in which legislative drafters, with no technical knowledge (just some training in logic), could produce working code that they and their policy officers could use to check drafts. Elsewhere on the same site you can see examples of L4 being used more fully.

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 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 the 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