Matcha: Formalizing Legal Reasoning

Matcha is an attempt to describe the structure of thought in legal reasoning not as natural language, but as a formal language. In this project, the mental organization that takes place before writing a legal answer is treated like code in programming. Based on facts and issues extracted from a legal problem, the writer describes legal reasoning through Matcha’s syntax. This description functions both as a protocol of notation for organizing human thought and as a protocol of data format that can be analyzed, generated, and evaluated by software.