Making Peru's laws fast and readable
Peru's official legislation portal is slow, fragile, and written in language almost no one outside law school can parse. I rebuilt the experience — end to end — as a fast, plain-language, connected way to read the law.
- Role
- Lead Design Engineer · solo build, with a practicing attorney for legal validation
- Status
- Shipped · open source · covered by Peruvian national press
The problem
The government portal for Peruvian legislation routinely took 8–12 seconds to load and fell over under modest traffic. Worse than the speed was the comprehension: legal Spanish is dense, amendments are invisible, and there's no way to see how one law connects to another. In sessions I ran with lawyers, students and journalists, people gave up before they found what they came for.
Decision
The bet: transparency over magic
Early versions just summarised laws with AI — and people didn't trust them. So I changed the frame: never replace the source, sit beside it. The final design shows the original legal text and a plain-language explanation side by side, clearly labelled as a summary, with the model's reasoning legible. Trust came from showing the seams, not hiding them.
How it's built
How I built it
React Server Components and edge caching for sub-second loads; a custom parser for Spanish legal citations; recursive CTEs to traverse the citation graph; pgvector + full-text search for retrieval; and a queue-based pipeline that runs Claude with structured outputs so summaries stay consistent and don't hallucinate. The citation network is a D3 force graph; the whole thing ships as an offline-first PWA.
Where it landed
legalize.pe is live, open source, and was picked up by Peru's major outlets (El Comercio, La República, Gestión) as a reference for civic technology in the region. The honest wins I can stand behind: a Lighthouse score in the high 90s, a JS payload an order of magnitude lighter than the official portal, and a reading experience real users told me they finally understood.