Coding Like a Lawyer: Learning to Programme Can Be Useful (and Fun) for Curating Legal Knowledge

Abstract

In this short paper, I reflect on the benefit of learning software programming for  the purpose of exploring and curating legal knowledge. I share my own experience of learning music copyright law with a selected few programmable computational tools. I conclude with a caveat that many computational tools are not necessarily easy to learn, but there can be intrinsic joy in coding even without immediate external rewards.

Keywords: legal knowledge curation, computational legal research, music copyright, exploratory data analysis, R, LilyPond, Sonic Pi, Software programming, digital humanities