Sarah Lawsky

Sarah Lawsky is the Stanford Clinton Sr. and Zylpha Kilbride Clinton Research Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. She leads research on computational approaches to tax law, notably co-developing Catala—a programming language for formalizing statutes—which was recognized as official software by the French government. Awarded the Inria International Chair (2024-2028), she collaborates with France's National Institute for Research in Digital Science on tax algorithm development.

Her research explores tax law formalization, computational jurisprudence, and AI applications in legal reasoning. Recent publications focus on bridging statutory law with computational logic through tools like Catala, enabling transparent tax code implementation and government accountability.

Publications demonstrate consistent focus on tax law computation, AI integration, and epistemic frameworks. Key themes include LLM capabilities in legal tasks, statute formalization methodologies, and interdisciplinary approaches to legal reasoning.

Awards include the Inria International Chair for advancing computational tax law. Her work with Catala supports French government initiatives to modernize income tax and social benefit algorithms.