About LawVM
LawVM compiles legal state from amendment acts. It demonstrates that ordinary human-written amendment law can be treated as an executable instruction stream at the text-state layer. It tells you what each provision says at any date, which act changed it, and where its answer is uncertain.
The proof boundary is narrow: text-state derivation from the available sources, with explicit evidence for what was observed, inferred, recovered, and left unresolved. Source completeness, legislator intent, oracle authority, and broader doctrinal interpretation remain outside that claim.
Read more: The Law in Force Should Be Knowable (the civic principle) · Why Law Is Law-Shaped (the structural analysis).
What LawVM optimizes for
- Auditability over magic
- Typed structure over ad hoc string patches
- Evidence over hand-wavy correctness claims
- Bounded investigation over endless architecture expansion
Non-goals
- Flattening jurisdiction maturity into one support claim
- Hiding source defects behind silent cleanup
- Glossy claims without evidence
- Presenting editorial consolidations as the only truth
Author
Elias Kunnas — kunnas.com
Open source
Get involved
LawVM v0.1 is meant to be a handoff artifact as much as a software release: proof that the zero-to-one construction is possible, with enough architecture and evidence for others to continue the work.
The next stage requires serious adoption: jurisdiction work, legal publisher QA, public-sector pilots, source-authority review, or funded infrastructure maintenance. Organizations using LawVM in a real setting need enough project context to avoid known traps.
Researchers: See Finland for empirical evidence and the verification workflow.
Government agencies: See Finland for proof of concept. The architecture supports multiple jurisdictions with different authority models.
Contributors: Clone the repo, run uv sync, try uv run lawvm --help. The architecture documentation is in notes/. Start with bounded tasks: one phase, one test, one adjudication classifier.
Adoption lanes: See Carry LawVM Forward for the concrete handoff map.
Contact: elias at kunnas.com
Legal note
LawVM publishes software, benchmarks, and research artifacts. For operative legal use, follow the authority model and official source regime of the jurisdiction in question.