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Motivations for Notebook

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Selina Zheng
    Twitter

Hierarchies in law

Ever since my first law lecture in 2018, I've realised that the most cryptic and verbose profession in the world is in fact, the most hierarchical and structured. Unlike my peers who majored in English or History, my Economist brain compulsively process the vast amount of legal knowledge in the form of a tree. With each tree a subject, nodes of a tree consists of information units of different hierarchies. It corresponds and reinforces the rigorous reasoning structures of the legal profession.

Example of my notes in criminal law:

murder_notes

Problem with digesting law notes

Although the hierarchical notes are much easier to read than how law is usually presented, via paragraphs of text, it is still difficult to consume. For professionals and students who are already familiar with the topics, it would be miles easier if detailed contents can be hidden for faster legal research and catalogue. I want my notes to be adjustable to my desired level of specificity.

However this is not possible for simple text editors like Microsoft Word. For example, just to prepare for my open-book law exams alone, I created 3 versions of notes of different lengths to facilitate faster information location, varying from 100+ pages to 30 pages for each topic.

Objectives

To solve this problem, I want to create a notebook interface that facilitate digesting hierarchical knowledge like law. It would take advantage of the similarity between how law information is structured and how JSON data is consumed and manipulated via React.

The interface would allow users to interact with hierarchical information structures efficiently via:

  • management (adding, deleting, dragging and dropping); and
  • viewing (through different note tabs and via different hierarchical levels).

This is my first independent programming project and hopefully, I can make accessing one of the most archaic professions in the world a little bit easier.