-

Measuring Law Over Time: A Network Analytical Framework with an Application to Statutes and Regulations in the United States and Germany

Daniel Katz

Our Paper “Measuring Law Over Time: A Network Analytical Framework with Application to Statutes and Regulations in United States and Germany” has now been published in Frontiers in Physics (Open Access) < Main Article > < Supplemental Material >

“We present a comprehensive framework for analyzing legal documents as multi-dimensional, dynamic document networks. We demonstrate the utility of this framework by applying it to an original dataset of statutes and regulations from two different countries, the United States and Germany, spanning more than twenty years (1998–2019). Our framework provides tools for assessing the size and connectivity of the legal system as viewed through the lens of specific document collections as well as for tracking the evolution of individual legal documents over time. Implementing the framework for our dataset, we find that at the federal level, the United States legal system is increasingly dominated by regulations, whereas the German legal system remains governed by statutes. This holds regardless of whether we measure the systems at the macro, the meso, or the micro level.”

-

Slides from “Modeling the Law & Justice System” – Virtual Talk at the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi

Daniel Katz

Slides from my Virtual Talk at the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi. In this presentation, I highlight the Complexity Challenge in Law, Six Forms of Modeling Legal Systems and conclude with some thoughts about Law + STEM.Thanks to the following orgs for hosting me – DAKSH, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, National Law University, Delhi & DCoE IIT, Delhi

-

Modeling the Law & Justice System – Talk by Professor Daniel Martin Katz at IIT-Delhi

Daniel Katz

It is a great pleasure to deliver a Virtual Talk today at IIT-Delhi — “Modeling the Law & Justice System” on May 25th 2021.

I will highlight the Complexity Challenge in Law, Six Forms of Modeling Legal Systems and concluded with some thoughts about Law+STEM.

Thanks to DAKSH, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, National Law University, Delhi and the DCoE IIT, Delhi for hosting me.

-

Research Handbook in Big Data Law (Roland Vogl, Editor)

Daniel Katz

Many contributors to THIS VOLUME include — Sharad Goel, Jennifer Skeem, Ravi Shroff, c Chris Slobogin, Stephen Caines, Daniel Ho, Daniel Seng, Przemyslaw Palka, Marco Lippi, Benjamin Alarie, Anthony Niblett, Albert Yoon, Harry Surden, Ashkon Farhangi, Ajay Sohmshetty, Ashraf Bah Rabiou, Daniel Katz, Michael Bommarito, Eric Detterman, Dirk Hartung, Johannes (Jan) C. Scholtes, H. Jaap van den Herik, Katherine Strandburg, John Nay, Ricardo Vieira de Carvalho Fernandes, Hugo Honda, Mary-Anne Williams, Bernhard Waltl, Roberto V. Zicari, Florian Möslein, Bart Verheij, Heng Zheng, James Yoon, Daniel W. Linna Jr., Mauritz Kop, Shlomit Labin, Uri Segal, Andrew Antos, Nischal Nadhamuni, Martí Manent

We are pleased to contribute our Chapter –

Michael Bommarito, Daniel Martin Katz & Eric Detterman,  LexNLP: Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction For Legal and Regulatory Texts in Research Handbook on Big Data Law (Edward Elgar Press) (Roland Vogl, ed.) (2021)

-

Legal Complexity – Short Talk at Stanford CodeX Future Law ONLINE Conference 2021

Daniel Katz

Yesterday we presented our work in a Short Talk at the Annual Stanford CodeX Future Law Conference — our presentation was focused on “Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law” (as well as our new paper on measuring legal systems over time, at scale).

Here are the Papers that were Briefly Presented —
Daniel Martin Katz, Corinna Coupette, Janis Beckedorf & Dirk Hartung, Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law, 10 Scientific Reports 18737 (2020) < Nature Research >

Corinna Coupette, Janis Beckedorf, Dirk Hartung, Michael Bommarito, & Daniel Martin Katz, Measuring Law Over Time: A Network Analytical Framework with an Application to Statutes and Regulations in the United States and Germany (Under Review – Frontiers in Physics) < SSRN >

-

Problem Solving Experiments Reveal that People are More Likely to Consider Solutions that Add Features than Solutions that Remove Them (via Nature)

Daniel Katz

Interesting paper … when individuals evaluate the space of possible solutions, they systematically overlook the solutions which involve removing parts of a system.  This may explain bloat in software, regulation, organizations which fail to innovate, etc.

ABSTRACT: “Improving objects, ideas or situations—whether a designer seeks to advance technology, a writer seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour—requires a mental search for possible changes. We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea or situation as they are to consider changes that add new components. People typically consider a limited number of promising ideas in order to manage the cognitive burden of searching through all possible ideas, but this can lead them to accept adequate solutions without considering potentially superior alternatives. Here we show that people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations. Across eight experiments, participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes when the task did not (versus did) cue them to consider subtraction, when they had only one opportunity (versus several) to recognize the shortcomings of an additive search strategy or when they were under a higher (versus lower) cognitive load. Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape and damaging effects on the planet.”