The Legal Observatory Project studies how legal obligations are created, revised, and removed across two parallel systems of governance — public regulation and private platform contracts. Public law changes through agencies. Private law changes through platforms. We track both.
The Observatory operates two empirical infrastructure projects. Each tracks one half of where legal obligations actually live.
Tracks federal regulatory obligations as they move from proposed rule to final rule to the Code of Federal Regulations. Surfaces side-by-side diffs, obligation-level extraction, and state administrative codes for 17 jurisdictions.
Tracks Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and platform governance documents over time. Detects clause-level changes — arbitration, class waivers, AI training rights, user content licenses, data sale provisions — across thousands of companies.
Courts are only part of the answer. Statutes, agencies, contracts, and platforms all generate legal duties — and each system changes on its own clock. The Observatory's empirical work is organized around questions like these.
How often do proposed regulatory obligations survive into final rules?
Which agencies revise obligations most aggressively between proposal and finalization?
How do companies modify arbitration, class-action waiver, privacy, AI-training, and user-content clauses?
When do public legal obligations and private contractual obligations move in parallel?
What patterns emerge in regulatory change after enforcement actions, court decisions, or political transitions?
How should courts, regulators, journalists, and scholars measure legal change empirically?
The Observatory's tools generate more signal than any one person can read. If you're interested in helping surface notable changes — drafting short writeups, analyzing trends, building public-facing reports, or contributing to scholarly work — get in touch.
The Observatory produces recurring outputs: a monthly report on notable changes, short research memos, and polished public posts.
One Public Law Change. One Private Law Change. Plus a short "what this means" essay.
The 2026 Legal Change Report — public regulation and private governance in motion.
The Life Cycle of Regulatory Obligations · Private Lawmaking at Scale.
Federal Register documents, CFR snapshots, and 880K+ extracted obligations available for academic research.
120K+ Terms of Service and Privacy Policy versions across 22K+ tracked sites, 2009–present.
Notice & Comment, Bloomberg Tax, Minimum Competence, SSRN short essays.
Anyone interested in empirical legal research, journalists working on regulatory or platform stories, and researchers who want access to the underlying datasets — get in touch.