AI for legal epidemiology

Published

November 12, 2025

Overview

Legal epidemiology – understanding the effects of laws on health – requires an understanding of what the law is. But laws are spread across jurisdictions and different levels of government, and are framed in technical language that can be difficult to encode for analysis. Since 2024, I have been working with collaborators on a project to apply large language models and modern retrieval methods to make encoding of laws easier, focusing on the municipal codes and ordinances of hundreds of citites in the United States. This is part of a broader interest in making law more accessible.

Timeline

  1. Initial presentation to the COEP center at NYU Langone (March 28, 2024)

  2. Internal presentation with updated slides describing prototypes (Oct. 7, 2024).

  3. Magdalena Cerda et al., Stemming the Tide of the US Overdose Crisis: How Can We Leverage the Power of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence?, Milbank Q. 2025; 103(SI):0610 (June 10, 2025).

  4. Presentation at SER Annual Meeting (July 13, 2025).

Current version of code

Legiscope.

People

  • Samrachana Adhikari, PhD
  • Magdalena Cerda, DrPh
  • Corey Davis, JD
  • Jaskiran Dhinsa, MD
  • Charles DiMaggio, PhD
  • Spruha Joshi, PhD
  • Pooja Shah, BS
  • Utkarsh Srivastava, MS