Month: November 2009

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Facts About the Length of H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act (AHCAA)

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In light of last night’s vote on H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, we decided to calculate a few numbers on the current bill. Based on the Library of Congress’s XML representation of the bill (which can be obtained here), we have calculated a number of linguistic and citation properties of the Bill. The House of Representative approved HR 3962 by a 220-215 margin. The New York Times features a useful analysis of the vote including a breakout by party and region here.

On the Sunday morning talk shows as well as in other outlets, there has been significant discussion regarding the size of H.R. 3962. Specifically, many critics have decried the length of the bill citing its 1990 pages. The bill is indeed 1990 pages as you can see if you choose to download a PDF copy of the bill.

The purpose of this post is to provide a perspective regarding the length of H.R. 3962. Those versed in the typesetting practices of the United States Congress know that the printed version of a bill contains a significant amount of whitespace including non-trivial space between lines, large headers and margins, an embedded table of contents, and large font. For example, consider page 12 of the printed version of H.R. 3962.  This page contains fewer than 150 substantive words.

We believe a simple page count vastly overstates the actual length of bill. Rather than use page counts, we counted the number of words contained in the bill and compared these counts to the number of words in the existing United States Code. In addition, we consider the number of text blocks in the bill– where a text block is a unit of text under a section, subsection, clause, or sub-clause.


Basic Information about the Length of H.R. 3962

Number of words in H.R. 3962 impacting substantive law:

  • 234,812 words (w/ generous calculation)

Number of total words in H.R. 3962: 363,086 words (w/ titles, tables of contents …)
Number of text blocks: 7,961
Average number of words per text block: 24.18
Average words per section: 267.03


Is this a Large or Small Number? Comparison to Harry Potter

Number of substantive words in H.R. 3962: 234,812 words
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – 257,000 words
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – 190,000 words
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – 198,000 words


Is this a Large or Small Number? Comparison to Other Legislation

Number of substantive words in Energy Bill of 2007: 157,835 words
Number of substantive words in Defense Authorization Act for 2010: 119,960 Words
H.R. 3962 is roughly 2x the Size of Medicare Rx Bill of 2003 (Given there is no public XML version of the bill, the Exact “Substantive Words” Number is not available)


Is this a Large or Small Number? Comparison to the Full U.S. Code

Size of the United States Code: 42+ Million Words
Relative Size of H.R. 3962: H.R. 3962 is roughly 1/2 of one percent of the size of the United States Code


Longest Sections in H.R. 3962

  • Sec 341. Availability Through Health Insurance Exchange
  • Sec 1222. Demonstration to promote access for Medicare beneficiaries with limited English proficiency by providing reimbursement for culturally and linguistically appropriate services.
  • Sec 1160: Implementation, and Congressional review, of proposal to revise Medicare payments to promote high value health care
  • Sec 305: Funding for the construction, expansion, and modernization of small ambulatory care facilities
  • Sec 1417: Nationwide program for national and State background checks on direct patient access employees of long-term care facilities and providers


Modifications of the Existing U.S. Code By H.R. 3962

Number of Strikeouts: 332
Number of Inserts: 390
Number of Re-designations: 65


Acts Most Cited By H.R. 3962

Social Security Act: 622 times
Public Health Service Act: 134 times
Affordable Health Care for America Act: 60 times
Indian Health Care Improvement Act: 56 times
Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act: 45 times
Employee Retirement Income Security Act: 39 times
Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act: 11 times
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: 7


Sections of the U.S. Code Cited (Properly) Most By H.R. 3962

25 U.S.C. §450. Congressional statement of findings: 38
25 U.S.C. §13. Expenditure of appropriations by Bureau: 13
42 U.S.C. §1396a(a). State plans for medical assistance: 10
42 U.S.C. §1396d(a). Definitions: 7
42 U.S.C. §2004a. Sanitation facilities: 7

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Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary [Repost from 3/25]

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Zoom on Network

Together with Derek Stafford from the University of Michigan Department of Political Science, Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary represents our initial foray into Computational Legal Studies. The full paper contains a number of interesting visualizations where we draw various federal judges together on the basis of their shared law clerks (1995-2004). The screen print above is a zoom very center of the center of the network.  Yellow Nodes represent Supreme Court Justices, Green Nodes represent Circuit Court Justices, Blue Nodes represent District Court Justices.

There exist many high quality formal models of judicial decision making including those considering decisions rendered by judges in judicial hierarchy, whistle blowing, etc. One component which might meaningfully contribute to the extent literature is the rigorous consideration of the social and professional relationships between jurists and the impacts (if any) these relationships impose upon outcomes. Indeed, from a modeling standpoint, we believe the “judicial game” is a game on a graph–one where an individual strategic jurist must take stock of time evolving social topology upon which he or she is operating. Even among judges of equal institutional rank, we observe jurists with widely variant levels social authority (specifically social authority follows a power law distribution).

So what does all of this mean? Take whistle blowing — the power law distribution implies that if the average judge has a whistle, the “super-judges” we identify within the paper could be said to have an air horn. With the goal of enriching positive political theory / formal modeling of the courts, we believe the development of a positive theory of judicial social structure can enrich our understanding of the dynamics of prestige and influence. In addition, we believe, at least in part, “judicial peer effects” can help legal doctrine socially spread across the network. In that vein, here is a view of our operationalization of the social landscape … a wide shot of the broader network visualized using the Kamada-Kawai visualization algorithm:

Here is the current abstract for the paper: Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. As part of a larger effort to develop a fully integrated model of judicial decision making, we argue that social structure-operationalized as the professional and social connections between judicial actors-partially directs outcomes in the hierarchical federal judiciary. Since different social structures impose dissimilar consequences upon outputs, the precursor to evaluating the doctrinal consequences that a given social structure imposes is a descriptive effort to characterize its properties. Given the difficulty associated with obtaining appropriate data for federal judges, it is necessary to rely upon a proxy measure to paint a picture of the social landscape. In the aggregate, we believe the flow of law clerks reflects a reasonable proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists. Having collected available information for all federal judicial law clerks employed by an Article III judge during the “natural” Rehnquist Court (1995-2004), we use these roughly 19,000 clerk events to craft a series of network based visualizations.   Using network analysis, our visualizations and subsequent analytics provide insight into the path of peer effects in the federal judiciary. For example, we find the distribution of “degrees” is highly skewed implying the social structure is dictated by a small number of socially prominent actors. Using a variety of centrality measures, we identify these socially prominent jurists. Next, we draw from the extant complexity literature and offer a possible generative process responsible for producing such inequality in social authority. While the complete adjudication of a generative process is beyond the scope of this article, our results contribute to a growing literature documenting the highly-skewed distribution of authority across the common law and its constitutive institutions.

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Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization

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Ohm on Privacy

On this blog, we have previously featured the work of Paul Ohm (Colorado Law School) including his important article Computer Programming and the Law: A New Research Agenda. Professor Ohm has recently posted Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization, 57 UCLA Law Review ____ (forthcoming 2010). A review of SSRN downloads indicates that despite having been posted in just the last two months, this paper is the top downloaded new law paper posted to the SSRN in the past 12 months.

From the abstract: “Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often “reidentify” or “deanonymize” individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so.”