Aug. 21, 2026
In 1986, in Communications of the ACM, Marek J. Sergot, Fereidoon Sadri, Robert Kowalski, Frank Kriwaczek, Peter Hammond, and H. Trevor Cory published "The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program".
This is the paper that was the start of the academic discussion of using logic programming languages to represent legal knowledge about statutes, the very idea that §Blawx continues to promote.
Three decades later, the question is what can we do with the combination of the symbolic artificial intelligence that was pioneered in the '80s, and the agentic LLM-powered systems of today.
As an illustration of how far we have come, and as an homage to the people who started it all, the British Nationality Act project added as an example to §Blawx today was drafted entirely by Claude Opus 5, using the §Blawx MCP server, in roughly 90 minutes.
It has gone through no human review, and is offered as a way to help show what to expect when giving §Blawx as a tool to your AI. The MCP service is available only to paid subscribers, but the new BNA example is accessible to anyone with a free-tier account.