Sarah Lawsky

Education

• PhD, University of California – Irvine
• LLM, New York University School of Law
• JD, Yale Law School
• AB, University of Chicago

Biography

Sarah B. Lawsky, the L.B. Lall and Sumitra Devi Lall Professor of Law, studies tax law, computational law, and the intersection of the two. Her recent work focuses on the formalization of tax law. Professor Lawsky research arguing for using a particular nonstandard logic to formalize tax law is the conceptual foundation for the domain-specific programming language Catala, which is the project of a team of computer scientists and lawyers.

Before joining the University of Illinois, Professor Lawsky taught at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, UC Irvine School of Law, and George Washington University Law School. Before entering academia, she worked as a tax lawyer for large law firms.

For more information, visit the personal website of Professor Lawsky: https://www.sarahlawsky.org/

Research Interests

• Software Engineering
• Formal Methods
• Programming Languages

Selected Articles in Journals

• A Logic for Statutes, 21 Fla. Tax Rev. 60 (2017)
• Formalizing the Code, 70 Tax L. Rev. 377 (2017)
• Form as Formalization, 16 Ohio St. Tech. L.J. 114 (2020)
• Teaching Algorithms and Algorithms for Teaching, 25 Fla. Tax Rev. 587 (2021)
• Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law, 75 SMU L. Rev. 535 (2022)
• Large Language Models as Tax Attorneys: A Case Study in Legal Capabilities Emergence, 382 Phil. Transactions of the Royal Society A (2024) (with John J. Nay, David Karamardian, Wenting Tao, Meghana Bhat, Raghav Jain, Aaron Travis Lee, Jonathan H. Choi, and Jungo Kasai)
• Computational Law and Epistemic Trespassing, 2 J. Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational L. (2024)
• Reasoning with Formalized Statutes: The Case of Capital Gains and Losses, 43 Va. Tax Rev. 361 (2024)