The Program of Islamic Law is currently developing a suite of digital Islamic law tools to expand access to and facilitate research in the field. Courts&Canons (CnC) is a suite of data science tools that facilitates research and insights into Islamic law and the motivating values behind it, across space and time.
Our CnC-Canons Annotator and CnC-Canons Matcher enable and simplify the process of collecting and annotating primary source-data about people, laws, places and more through AI and the use of structured relational databases that enable specific citations (RAG). We also build research informed data visualizations using both supervised and unsupervised learning models designed to extract core data from Arabic texts. This project fits within an initiative that develops structured datasets of Islamic legal and historical texts in Arabic, Farsi, and other Middle Eastern languages, with focus on judicial materials and the interpretive legal canons used by textualist judges, and with methods that enable computational analysis of legal reasoning across Islamic history.
Together, these tools will open possibilities for answering new questions about both Islamic legal history and contemporary law, and related fields in Islamic studies more broadly, at scale and as they change over time and place. Joining scholarly texts with digital tools will, moreover, enable insights in Islamic law and history that neither jurist nor machine could arrive alone.