[lawtomated]

We think it helps if coders need to work with lawyers, e.g. particularly so in the fintech, legaltech, regtech and insurtech biz space. That said, it's somewhat unequal in terms of availability of educative resources. For lawyers wanting to code they are spoilt for choice with free, freemium or premium courseware online or in person.

For coders wanting to learn law it's much less available and significantly more costly. A lot of online legal learning resources are very oldschool, incorrect or incomplete, which is a real shame.

[gamblor956]

Most legal codes are available freely online. Almost all US federal cases are freely available online going back to the first SCOTUS. Most state appellate court cases are also freely available online. Hundreds of lawyers and firms provide online articles or posts explaining the law, including detailed analyses of cases, regulations, issues, etc. Programmers wanting to learn the law are spoiled with choices for free online legal resources.

And if you're willing to look beyond online sources, legal treatises for laymen are available for most subjects for under $40. Many of those treatises (like the E&E law series) are so good that they're used as law school textbooks.

Meanwhile, for lawyers wanting to learn to code, a lot of online programming resources are very old school, incorrect, or incomplete. A lot of them refer to languages (or versions of languages) which no one uses anymore, features which have long been deprecated, or promote the use of code with poor security or programming practice, which is a real shame.

[mushufasa]

I think the online educational resource availability follows from the field dynamics. Python is python no matter whether you're in India or Hawaii. Law is specific to geographies. Law schools generally either focus on their regional context or, at the very top, teach theory instead of practical law (e.g. Yale).

In that context of fragmentation, it's hard to imagine what an legal 'codecademy' would look like. You can't properly teach theory without a strong writing component, and the professors to review it would put you back into the cost structure of a full university (don't think a neural net would cut it, at least within the next decade). For a bunch of multiple choice on practical law, you would need to restrict your coverage to a specific geography, not to mention a specific field, limiting the market for such a service.

I guess you could start with the uniform criminal code + uniform civil code in the USA. Maybe common law principles too.

While it's generally great for people to learn to code as a hobby or for personal projects, I can't think of viable personal projects within law -- just as you wouldn't want to encourage personal experimentation in medicine. Likely the audience would be people trying to better understand their own problems with the law, which incentivizes Dunning-Kruger or law students, who are already in / will be law school. Unlike coding, law school degrees are absolutely required for the vast majority of legal careers.

I think the success of online legal resource providers like Clerky or LegalZoom is that they help non-lawyers navigate the law (outcome-oriented), rather than being a general educational resource.

[lawtomated]

Yes we were thinking of a legal and localized equivalent of codeacademy for law when we said there's simply not the same level of legal learning resources online as there is for coding.

Coding resources have come on a thousand fold, even in the last 5 - 10 years with top level teaching available for free / freemium via Coursera codeacademy, freecodecamp, udemy, udacity etc. Also all well supported by active user communities alongside stackoverflow and the massive open source community supporting the most popular languages and libraries.

There isn't an equivalent for legal knowledge in that sense, so far as we are aware.

Likewise you can't easily have personal projects with law or medicine - to do so is almost certainly illegal in most jurisdictions.