معرفی
Sarah B. Lawsky is the L.B. Lall and Sumitra Devi Lall Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, where she serves as Co-Director of the Innovation Law and Technology Program. She also holds an International Chair at Inria's Prosecco group from 2024 through 2028. Professor Lawsky is a leading scholar at the intersection of tax law and computational methods, with expertise in formalizing legal statutes through computational approaches.
Her educational background includes an AB from the University of Chicago, a JD from Yale Law School, an LLM from New York University School of Law, and a PhD from the University of California – Irvine. Before entering academia, she worked as a tax lawyer for large law firms.
Professor Lawsky's research focuses on tax law, computational law, and their intersection, with particular attention to formal logic and formal methods. She has pioneered work on using nonstandard logic to formalize tax law, which serves as the conceptual foundation for Catala, a domain-specific programming language developed by a team of computer scientists and lawyers. Her scholarship demonstrates how computational approaches can enhance legal reasoning, tax compliance, and legal education. She has developed innovative educational tools including the Lawsky Practice Problems website, which generates tax practice problems and has been used to assess large language models' capabilities in tax law.
Her recent publications reveal a growing trend toward interdisciplinary research combining law, computer science, and artificial intelligence. She examines how computational methods can formalize complex tax statutes, how large language models perform on tax law problems, and how algorithmic approaches can improve legal education. Her work bridges theoretical legal scholarship with practical applications in legal technology.
As Co-Director of the Innovation Law and Technology Program, Professor Lawsky collaborates with experts from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and the School of Information Sciences. She teaches Contracts and Federal Income Taxation, aiming to build upon the strong tax program established by Professor Dick Kaplan at Illinois.
Professor Lawsky has developed several significant projects including Lawsky Practice Problems, Catala (a programming language for tax law), the Lawsky Entry-Level Hiring Report, and various academic tools for teaching and grading. Her work on Catala has received media coverage in Communications of the ACM and Bloomberg Tax.
