Ruled-based Citation Checker Using Finite State Automata

Ruled-based Citation Checker Using Finite State Automata

I was trying to review my crim law reading last night in bed, and thought of the idea of using FSA to check legal citation.

If citation in legal writing conforms strictly to some predefined rules (either Bluebook or ALWD), then there’s no reason why the problem can’t be solved by a FSA which describes the finite number of rules set forth in those citation manuals. The solution seems pretty straight forward, and can be implemented fairly elegantly in either python or perl, off the top of my head. On the other hand, a functional language like list or scheme can probable implement achieve the same with significantly fewer lines of code.

More to come later…

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