Computational Legal Studies™

The Journal of Social Structure is currently running an online visualization symposium that I would suggest checking out.  Among the broader set of offerings, the readers of this blog might be particularly interested in Pierre de Vries‘ work on the evolution of lobbying coalitions. Anyway, for those who want to learn more about the FCC lobbying project — check out the slide show above!

Jon Bruner from Forbes has created a really fun interface.  Above I have highlighted Washtenaw County, MI (Ann Arbor and my home)); Travis County, TX (Austin); Washington, D.C.  Click above and explore! {HT: Flowing Data}

Click on the above picture and you will be taken to the Interactive Gallery of Computational Legal Studies. Once inside the gallery, click on any thumbnail to see the full size image. Each image features a link to supporting materials such as documentation and/or the underlying academic paper. We hope to add more content to gallery over the coming weeks and months — so please check back!  Please note that load time may vary depending upon your connection, machine, etc.

Above is a movie displaying Title 16 (Conservation) a subset of the content contained within the United States Code. At more than 2,400 pages (download it here), Title 16 is one of the larger titles in the US Code.  Yet, it is not the largest.  For example, Title 26 (Internal Revenue Code) and Title 42 (Public Health and Welfare) are far larger than the object displayed above.

Now, you might be wondering why we chose to generate this movie. We envisioned at least two purposes.

(1) The title of this blog is Computational Legal Studies.  One of our major goals to either develop or apply tools that scale to life in the era of Big Data. Given the scope of an object such as the United States Code, it is is clear that a significant class of potential analysis cannot reasonably be undertaken without the use of computational tools.  Thus, with respect to developing new insights, we believe computational linguistics, information theory, applied graph theory can be of great use.  For those interested, our new paper entitled A Mathematical Approach to the Study of the United States Code offers our initial exploration of the possibilities.

(2) We believe this movie can be a meaningful pedagogical device.  Many students enter law school and are dismayed when even in  statutory based classes they are not exclusively reviewing the black letter law. Given the scope of this and other large bodies of documents, any model of legal education cannot be exclusively be dedicated to teaching black letter law. Instead, such training is appropriately devoted to a mixture of existing legal rules as well as the development of information acquisition protocols that train students to navigate the relevant landscape.