Month: December 2010

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Some Papers We Have Been Reading & Final Post of 2010

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A Plea for More Aggregation: The Looming Threat to Empirical Legal Scholarship (By John Pfaff)

The Microstructure of the ‘Flash Crash’: Flow Toxicity, Liquidity Crashes and the Probability of Informed Trading (By David Easley, Marcos Mailoc Lopez de Pardo & Maureen O’Hara)

The Death of Big Law (By Larry Ribstein)

Justices and Legal Clarity: Analyzing the Complexity of Supreme Court Opinions (By Ryan Owens and Justin Wedeking)

Citizens United and the Illusion of Coherence (By Richard Hasen)

Gaming the Past: The Theory and Practice of Historic Baselines in the Administrative State (By J.B. Ruhl & James Salzman)

On the Origins of Western Law and Western Civilization (in the Indus Valley) (By Robin Kar)

What is Law? A Coordination Model of the Characteristics of Legal Order (By Gilian Hadfield and Barry Weingast)

Who Speaks for Science? A Response to the National Academy of Sciences Report on Forensic Science (By Simon Cole)

What Do Federal District Judges Want? An Analysis of Publications, Citations, and Reversals (By Stephen Choi, Mitu Gulati & Eric Posner)

The Wages of Stealth Overruling (With Particular Attention to Miranda v. Arizona) (By Barry Friedman)

Frames of Injustice: The Bias We Overlook (By Adam Benforado)

Citations in the U.S. Supreme Court: An Empirical Study of their Use and Significance (By Frank Cross, James Spriggs, Timothy Johnson & Paul Wahlbeck)

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Google Ngram Viewer [From Google Labs]

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Leveraging the Google Books corpus, Google has released the Google N Gram viewer.  There is coverage all over the web … but here is just few articles: (NY Times) (Mother Jones) (Scientific American) (Boston.com).  It is also possible to download the underlying data.  For additional information, click here to access the about page.  Very cool stuff!

While Google Ngrams is a fun exploratory tool, it is merely a glimpse at the real possibilities in the era of Big Data. Two major conferences this year — Princeton CITP: Big Data Conference and ECCS 2010: High Throughput Humanities offered a preview of the world that is coming.  In my presentation at these conferences,  I tried to underscore the ways in which these developments are meaningful for social scientists, legal scholars and practicing lawyers. In short, the prospects for arbitrage here are significant.  It will be exciting to watch creative folks try to put things together …