Described herein are various embodiments of a network element including an access control list processing module to process an access control list of the network element. In one embodiment, the access control list processing module converts the access control list into set of subsections of rules, where each rule of a subsection mutually exclusive of each other rule in the subsection. The network element may then make forwarding decisions for network data using the set of subsections of rules. In one embodiment, semantics preserving transformations can be applied to rules and data to enable more efficient processing of filtering or rules.