TY - JOUR
T1 - AI for scaling legal reform
T2 - mapping and redacting racial covenants in Santa Clara County
AU - Surani, Faiz
AU - Suzgun, Mirac
AU - Raman, Vyoma
AU - Manning, Christopher D.
AU - Henderson, Peter
AU - Ho, Daniel E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2026. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected] for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact [email protected].
PY - 2026
Y1 - 2026
N2 - Legal reform can be challenging due to the volume, complexity, and interdependence of laws, codes, and records. One salient example is racially restrictive covenants. In 2021, California mandated that counties identify and redact such covenants, but implementation has proved challenging, with 84 million pages in Santa Clara County (SCC) alone. Through a partnership with SCC, we develop an open, accurate, and fast language model-based pipeline to solve this problem. Our model is deployable elsewhere with minimal resources, fundamentally altering the cost-benefit calculus of such policy reform. We estimate one in three SCC properties were subject to racial covenants in 1950.
AB - Legal reform can be challenging due to the volume, complexity, and interdependence of laws, codes, and records. One salient example is racially restrictive covenants. In 2021, California mandated that counties identify and redact such covenants, but implementation has proved challenging, with 84 million pages in Santa Clara County (SCC) alone. Through a partnership with SCC, we develop an open, accurate, and fast language model-based pipeline to solve this problem. Our model is deployable elsewhere with minimal resources, fundamentally altering the cost-benefit calculus of such policy reform. We estimate one in three SCC properties were subject to racial covenants in 1950.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105040128732
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105040128732#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1093/jla/laaf005
DO - 10.1093/jla/laaf005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105040128732
SN - 2161-7201
VL - 18
SP - 151
EP - 181
JO - Journal of Legal Analysis
JF - Journal of Legal Analysis
IS - 1
ER -