We're not the first to think about this.
The rules-as-code field is fifty years old. Every project below taught us something; several have active teams we hope to collaborate with. Nomos is best understood as a layer built on their shoulders — not a greenfield replacement.
Languages, systems, and research programs.
Default logic as a first-class feature, mirroring how legislation structures exceptions. Compiles annotated legislation to OCaml/Python. Lawyer-readable PDFs.
The default-logic design (Lawsky 2017); the article-style syntax; the provenance discipline; the possible reuse of its IR.
OCaml-first toolchain; no LLM integration; academic DX; heavy specification burden.
Tax and benefit law modeled as typed Python. Production-deployed by multiple governments (FR, UK, NZ, Tunisia, Senegal).
Proof that rules-as-code works at government scale. Tax-rule modeling patterns. Parameter vs. variable distinction.
Python-only; imperative; no temporal typing; no LLM bridge.
Visual rules-as-code for lawyers over s(CASP) — a goal-directed ASP engine. Generates natural-language explanations for every answer.
Explanation-first UX. Lawyer-as-primary-user framing. The CodeX Prize ecosystem.
Visual/Blockly interface for us — not where serious adoption lives. Prolog runtime dependency.
Controlled natural language compiles to Prolog. Lawyers write near-English prose that an engine can reason over.
The controlled-natural-language idea as a possible future frontend. Kowalski's framing of law-as-logic.
Small tooling; research-only; parsing ambiguities that prose brings.
Goal-directed Answer Set Programming with automatic justification traces. Blawx uses it as its engine.
Justification-tracking as a runtime property. Possible backend option for Nomos later.
SWI-Prolog dependency; niche community; poor browser story.
XML interchange format for legal rules. Interop between rule engines.
A possible interop export target. The abstract model of rule + exception + defeasibility.
Not a programming language. Verbose. Not what humans write directly.
Smart legal contracts. Cicero templates + Ergo DSL + Concerto data models.
Concerto (still alive) as a type-system base. Contract-specific vocabulary.
Ergo itself is largely dormant. Blockchain framing. Template brittleness.
Haskell-based legal DSL with formal verification and visualization.
Multi-target compilation (LP, English, diagrams). Attention to formal semantics.
Small community; Haskell barrier; research-only.
Formal contract specification language with runtime monitoring.
Event-based semantics for contract performance. Obligation/right/permission algebra.
Narrow contract focus; research prototype.
Landmark encoding of an entire statute in Prolog. Awarded the CodeX Prize in 2021.
The foundational proof that statutes are computable. A reminder that the logic was never the hard part.
Purely prose-out-of-band; all facts had to be hand-entered as Prolog terms.
Reusable OSS — the layer below us.
Everything below is permissively-licensed, battle-tested, and either already integrated or scheduled. Reusing these is how Nomos ships as a side project instead of a PhD.
US legal citation extractor. ~3k GitHub stars. BSD.
→ Wrap as Nomos's US citation resolver.
Authoritative US case-law archive. Free Law Project.
→ Resolve case numbers → full opinions in authority references.
spaCy NER pipeline for UK legal text.
→ UK citation resolver for the UK jurisdiction pack.
Accord Project's type-modeling DSL. Still active, GSoC 2026.
→ Type-system base, extended with temporal + defeasible annotations.
OASIS XML standard for legislation worldwide.
→ Import statutes → emit Nomos rule skeletons.
Contract Understanding Atticus Dataset. 13k+ clause labels.
→ Evaluate extract<Clause> — publish numbers in the README.
Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset. 47k labels.
→ Evaluate extract<DealTerm>.
Atticus Clause Retrieval Dataset. 126k query-clause pairs.
→ Evaluate retrieval-based extract operations.
LLM gateway. Used for extract<T> today.
→ Currently integrated. See packages/llm.
Pretraining corpora (256GB → 689GB).
→ Only if we ever need to fine-tune a Nomos-specialized extractor.
Legal-docs-as-linked-data. Prior art on structured markup.
→ Cite as inspiration; possible import/export target.
Guided legal interviews. ~1.5k stars.
→ Output target — compile a Nomos program to an interactive interview.
Durable execution runtime (same choice as Weft).
→ Back human-in-loop gates that must survive restarts.
Credit discipline.
Every paper or project above is cited in our README, our research pages, and — eventually — in any academic write-up. "I didn't know about them" is not a defensible position after fifty years of work.
If we borrow an idea, we name the source in a code comment. If we reuse a library, it's a declared dependency with the upstream license. If you see something unattributed, open an issue.