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

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.”

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