Sarah B. Lawsky
Stanford Clinton Sr. and Zylpha Kilbride Clinton Research Professor of Law, Pritzker School of Law
Sarah Lawsky is a tax lawyer and philosophical logician who brings together her two disciplines to confront foundational questions about the capacity of law to be formalized—to be expressed in deterministic logical terms suitable for mathematical (and hence computational) processing.
She is being recognized for her international impact at the intersection of law, artificial intelligence, and real-world policy questions of government revenue and equity, as well as the local impact she makes by teaching tax law at Northwestern.
Lawsky is the author of numerous landmark articles on tax law, including recent work on statistical artificial intelligence. She and co-authors from computer science have also created domain-specific programming language, called Catala, for the purposes of formalizing tax law. In recognition of her contributions to this project, Lawsky was honored as an International Chair at France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) for 2024-2028. This Chair will permit Lawsky to split her time between Northwestern and Inria Paris in order to further develop Catala with her collaborators and move ever closer to fair and administrable tax law.