Computational Legal Studies™

I just showed these two videos (one above, one below) in my Quantitative Methods for Lawyers Class here at MSU Law. I think it is important to try to let people know where things really stand with Big Data and ‘Soft’ Artificial Intelligence (i.e. just exactly what is possible today – and what is soon going to move from the high end lab to the enterprise level to the level of personal computing).

Challenge: Watch these two videos and ask yourself the following question: Am I really sure that professional fields such as law, medicine, education, etc. are not going be dialed in for a real quant and technology invasion? Marc Andreessen thinks so (yeah software is indeed eating the world).

One of the purposes of this blog is to create a venue to highlight what the rise of computation, software, big data, soft AI, etc. mean for the future of legal education and the legal services industry. Our business is going to change (has changed) and obviously there is a major disconnect between the scholarship / research and development side of our industry and the market for legal education/legal academics.

The sophisticates in legal academy are obsessed with causal inference and experimental methods. That is completely understandable as these approaches are now mainstream methods to do rigorous policy evaluation and social science work with law applications.

Let me encourage folks to think a bit more broadly about what falls in the broader set of rigorous approaches. In short, engineering is über rigorous (even if there is not an IV regression to be found).

We are entering the age of Quantitative Legal Prediction (for a historical analog see Quant Finance). Indeed, as I will argue in forthcoming work this is key to the future of our industry. Causal inference (as well as experimental methods) are not the core of what won the NetFlix Prize or what built IBM Watson. Rather, it was Machine learning, Network Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Probabilistic Graph Models, the Science of Similarity and Algorithm Construction, etc.

Here is the good news – those who have been trained in high end methods are in striking distance of the above (although it would be useful to learn (or collaborate with someone who knows) a real programming language). R is not a real programming language and STATA does not even pretend to be one.

Yesterday’s Fast Is Today’s Slow — Time to step up your game

Katz & Bommarito – Slides from Introductory Tutorial in Network Analysis and Law @ Jurix 2011 Meeting (University of Vienna – Faculty of Law)

Announcing the Beta Pre-Release of Legal Language Explorer.com < Search the History of ANY Phrase in the Decisions of the United States Supreme Court >

The 21st Century Law Practice London Summer Program – MSU College of Law – (In Partnership with University of Westminster)

The MIT School of Law: A Perspective on Legal Education in the 21st Century [Presentation Slides Version 1.02]

The Old Bailey Online –> Access 197,000 Trials — [ 1674 -1913 ]

Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity [Via McKinsey Global Institute]

Dynamic Reconfiguration of Human Brain Networks during Learning [From PNAS]

The Electronic World Treaty Index [Our Post @ VoxPopuLII - Cornell LII]

Applying the Science of Similarity to Computer Forensics (with lots of other potential applications) [via Jesse Kornblum]

What is Computational Legal Studies? Katz Presentation @ University of Houston – Workshop on Law & Computation

Rock / Paper / Scissors – Man v. Machine (as t→∞ you are not likely to win) [via NY Times]

Robert Trivers: Mathematical Approaches to Problems in Evolutionary Social Theory

Modeling the Financial Crisis [ From Nature ]

IBM Watson on Jeopardy – Scoreboard: Watson 2, Humans 0 [via CNN]

Katz -ICPSR Summer Program 2011 – Full Course Slides for Computing for Complex Systems (20+ Classes)

Crime Maps: Interactive Exploration of Crime Stats [via The Guardian]

Many of you are aware of my obsession (here) (here) (here) with fractals, power law distributions, etc. and their role in understanding a variety of phenomena.  In this spirit, I recently came across this video on MIT World from the late Benoît B. Mandelbrot.  It is well worth the watch – enjoy!

This is a sad day for the American Legal Academy. It has been reported (here) (here) (here) that Larry Ribstein has unexpectedly passed away.

While I have only known Larry for about a year, we probably exchanged ~100 emails and provided comments on our respective papers. He had been helping me with my “MIT School of Law” paper as well as some of my other projects. I had recently provided commentary on his Wisconsin Law Review article on the Future of General Counsels.  This is a very important paper.

Larry was one of the few people who really understood what was happening in our industry. While we did not agree on all subjects (particularly some of his views of corporate law and economic theory) his work on the future of legal education was straight up visionary. Taken together, I believe it will be seen as the template – the sketch of the future of our industry. Larry – I will miss you very much.

In partnership with Michigan State University College of Law and Emory Law, today we announce the Beta Pre-Release of a New Web Interface – LegalLanguageExplorer.com. We are just getting started here with this project and anticipate many features that will be rolling out to you in the near future. Please feel free to send us your feedback / comments.

BASIC FEATURES:

Instant Return of a Time Series Plot for One or More Comma Separated Phrases.  The default search is currently interstate commerce, railroad, deed (with plots for each of the term displayed simultaneously).

Feel free to test out ANY phrase of Up to Four Words in length.

Here are just a few of our favorites:

Clear and Present Danger
Habeas Corpus
Custodial Interrogation
Due Process
Unconstitutional
Property
Privacy

SCOPE OF COVERAGE:
In the current version, we are offering results for EVERY decision of the United States Supreme Court (1791-2005).  We plan to soon expand to other corpora including the U.S. Court of Appeals, etc.

FULL TEXT CASE ACCESS:
Each of the Phrases you search will be highlighted in Blue.  If you click on these highlighted phrases you will be taken to the full list of United States Supreme Court decisions that employ this phrase:

ADVANCED FEATURES:
Check out the advanced features including normalization and alternative graphing tools.

PAPER:
Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Julie Seaman, Adam Candeub & Eugene Agichtein, Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the ‘Evolution’ of Legal Language in Proceedings of Jurix: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Vienna 2011) available at  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1971953

PRESENTATION & HELPFUL TUTORIAL:
Click on the Image Below and You Will Be Directed to our Presentation at 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems ( Jurix 2011 – Vienna )
This offers some motivation for the project as well as a Brief Slide Based Tutorial Designed to Highlight Various Functions Available on the Site.

TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION:
Michael J. Bommarito, Building Legal Language Explorer: Interactivity and Drill-Down, noSQL and SQL available at http://www.michaelbommarito.com/blog/2011/12/16/building-legal-language-explorer-interactivity-and-drill-down-nosql-and-sql/

I am going to bump this post back to the top as a reminder – we look forward to seeing you at the Jurix 2011 Network Analysis and Law Tutorial …

“Prior to the 2011 Jurix Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Professor Daniel Martin Katz (Michigan State University, College of Law) and Michael Bommarito (University of Michigan – Center for the Study of Complex Systems) will present a tutorial on Network Analysis and Law.

“While historically allied with fields such as mathematical sociology, developments in network science have been generated by a wide range of disciplines, with major recent contributions offered by fields such as applied mathematics and statistical physics. Applied graph theorists often refer to networks as dependency graphs because they formalize the underlying linkages between objects.  Whether the objects in question are webpages on the internet, individuals in a social network such as Facebook or software dependencies in computer programming, the study of networks is the ‘science of our times.’

Building upon the developments in this interdisciplinary field, legal scholars and social scientists have recently begun to apply the tools of network science to bring new insight to a variety of long standing questions including the social structure of legal elites and the ‘evolution’ of the common law. This introductory tutorial is designed to help acquaint intellectually curious scholars with developments in this rapidly emerging field.”

Please join us in Vienna, Austria – December 13, 2011 @ Universität Wien for the Network Analysis and Law Tutorial as we help kick off Jurix 2011 Week.“