Sarah B. Lawsky
L.B. Lall and Sumitra Devi Lall Professor of Law
Co-Director, Innovation Law and Technology Program
Contact
Assistant:
Cindy Smith
(217) 300-0210
csmith16@illinois.edu
About
About
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’s 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/
Education
AB, University of Chicago
JD, Yale Law School
LLM, New York University School of Law
PhD, University of California – Irvine
Areas of Expertise
Income Tax
Partnership Tax
Computational Law
Law and Formal Methods
Publications
Selected Publications
Reasoning with Formalized Statutes: The Case of Capital Gains and Losses, 43 Va. Tax Rev. 361 (2024)
Computational Law and Epistemic Trespassing, 2 J. Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational L. (2024)
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)
Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law, 75 SMU L. Rev. 535 (2022)
Law, Legal Socializations, and Epistemic Injustice, 47 L. & Social Inquiry (2022)
Teaching Algorithms and Algorithms for Teaching, 25 Fla. Tax Rev. 587 (2021)
Form as Formalization, 16 Ohio St. Tech. L.J. 114 (2020)
Formalizing the Code, 70 Tax L. Rev. 377 (2017)
A Logic for Statutes, 21 Fla. Tax Rev. 60 (2017)
Courses
Contracts
Income Taxation