Law
Legal research, evaluated by legal researchers
How legal judgment shows outside the courtroom and the seminar room, and the standard the founding cohort will hold it to. Everything below is a draft in public, on purpose.
What counts as evidence of legal research skill
Most legal research never becomes a law-review article. It becomes the regulatory consultation that cites its authorities precisely, the amicus brief whose argument survives hostile reading, the compliance analysis that says what the rule requires and where it stops. An evaluator can read research skill directly from how a lawyer states what the law is — and, just as much, from whether they say what it is not.
The public record is rich and underused: consultations and rulemaking comments are published by agencies, filings and decisions by courts, doctrine drafts and institutional positions by academics and associations. A careful piece of public legal writing tells an evaluator more about its author's rigor than the name of the firm or faculty behind it.
Legal engineering counts too. A contract that anticipates failure modes honestly, a regulation written so its subjects can comply without guessing, a data-protection analysis that maps each legitimate-interest claim to a specific processing purpose — these are artifacts of judgment, evaluable even when privileged work never can be.
The discipline's hardest-to-see skill is candor with authority: distinguishing holding from dictum, noting where courts have split, admitting when the precedent is thin or going the other way. Advocacy hides that skill; evaluation is built to find it.
The legal research evaluation rubric, first draft
This rubric reads legal work the way a demanding referee reads a brief: for precision with authority and honesty about its limits, not for which side it serves.
- Doctrinal precision
- States what the law holds, at what level, in which jurisdiction — and does not quietly upgrade a dissent, a dictum, or a first-instance ruling into settled doctrine.
- Precedent reasoning
- Analogies are argued, not asserted: the like cases are shown to be like on legally relevant grounds, and the distinctions the other side will raise are met rather than omitted.
- Source discipline
- Primary over secondary where it matters, pinpoint citations a reader can follow, and candor about how authorities have been treated since — a source quietly overruled is a finding, not a footnote.
- Normative honesty
- Keeps what the law is apart from what the author thinks it should be, and says which claim is which. Persuasion is the advocate's job; the researcher's job is that a hostile reader still learns the true state of the law.
Founding legal evaluators will attack this draft first — including against their own briefs and consultations.
What founding legal evaluators will do
Take the rubric apart: where it rewards citation pageantry over reasoning, where it punishes honest policy argument, where a dimension cannot actually be scored from a public artifact.
Run calibration rounds on public work — consultations, published briefs, doctrine drafts, compliance analyses — scoring independently and comparing spreads, so the first published scores come with known uncertainty instead of false authority.
Carry the discipline's first calibration records into the open community: the legal researchers whose judgment is itself part of the instrument.
Who this is for
The founding cohort is looking for legal researchers whose judgment is already in daily use, wherever it is exercised:
- Regulatory and public-policy lawyers whose consultations and comments are published and read.
- In-house and compliance counsel whose best analysis lives in memos no court will ever see.
- Legal academics and doctrinal writers who want evaluation to reward reasoning over venue prestige.
- Legal-engineering and computational-law practitioners whose artifacts — contracts, rules-as-code, policy analyses — are reproducible.
Who this is not for
Self-selection matters more than any filter we could write, so here is the honest version:
- Anyone after a credential for its own sake — the founding stage produces standards, not badges.
- Advocates looking for a persuasion contest; this rubric scores rigor, and rigor sometimes belongs to the losing side.
- Anyone uncomfortable having their evaluation accuracy tracked — the calibration record is the point of the design.
- Anyone who needs a live scoring platform today; the mechanics on this page are in design, and the tense is deliberate.
Apply to evaluate law
Law is pre-selected on the application. Link to public legal work we can read — a consultation, a brief, a doctrine draft, an ORCID or repository profile.