Author: clsadmin

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Gary Flake: Is Pivot a Turning Point for Web Exploration? [TED 2010]

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Another in the series of talks at TED 2010 …. From the description … “Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.”

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Dissipation and Displacement of Hotspots in Reaction-Diffusion Models of Crime [PNAS]

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From the abstract… “The mechanisms driving the nucleation, spread, and dissipation of crime hotspots are poorly understood. As a consequence, the ability of law enforcement agencies to use mapped crime patterns to design crime prevention strategies is severely hampered. We also lack robust expectations about how different policing interventions should impact crime. Here we present a mathematical framework based on reaction-diffusion partial differential equations for studying the dynamics of crime hotspots. The system of equations is based on empirical evidence for how offenders move and mix with potential victims or targets. Analysis shows that crime hotspots form when the enhanced risk of repeat crimes diffuses locally, but not so far as to bind distant crime together. Crime hotspots may form as either supercritical or subcritical bifurcations, the latter the result of large spikes in crime that override linearly stable, uniform crime distributions. Our mathematical methods show that subcritical crime hotspots may be permanently eradicated with police suppression, whereas supercritical hotspots are displaced following a characteristic spatial pattern. Our results thus provide a mechanistic explanation for recent failures to observe crime displacement in experimental field tests of hotspot policing.”

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What’s Next? Judging Sequences of Binary Events [HT Paul Kedrosky]

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From the abstract … “The authors review research on judgments of random and nonrandom sequences involving binary events with a focus on studies documenting gambler’s fallacy and hot hand beliefs. The domains of judgment include random devices, births, lotteries, sports performances, stock prices, and others. After discussing existing theories of sequence judgments, the authors conclude that in many everyday settings people have naive complex models of the mechanisms they believe generate observed events, and they rely on these models for explanations, predictions, and other inferences about event sequences. The authors next introduce an explanation-based, mental models framework for describing people’s beliefs about binary sequences, based on 4 perceived characteristics of the sequence generator: randomness, intentionality, control, and goal complexity. Furthermore, they propose a Markov process framework as a useful theoretical notation for the description of mental models and for the analysis of actual event sequences.”

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Blaise Aguera y Arcas Demos Augmented-Reality Maps [Ted 2010]

clsadmin

“Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look ….”

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The Law Clerkship Tournament : The Expanded Edition [Repost]

clsadmin

Our multipart series on the clerkship tournament continues above with an expanded edition of the law clerks data.  The data is derived from my paper Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary (2010 Forthcoming–Ohio State Law Journal).

It is important to note the above data is merely the raw data. While we obviously could threshold for number of graduates per school, we choose not to do so because we do not have any particular theoretic reason to believe that placements linearly scale to differences in size of graduating classes. In other words, given we do not know the proper functional form — we just offer the raw data. For those interested in other posts on this subject, please click on the law clerks tag. or the law schools tag.

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The Development of Structure in the Citation Network of the United States Supreme Court — Now in HD!

clsadmin

What are some of the key takeaway points?

(1) The Supreme Court’s increasing reliance upon its own decisions over the 1800-1830 window.

(2) The important role of maritime/admiralty law in the early years of the Supreme Court’s citation network.  At least with respect to the Supreme Court’s citation network, these maritime decisions are the root of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence.

(3) The increasing centrality of decisions such as Marbury v. Madison, Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee to the overall network.

The Development of Structure in the SCOTUS Citation Network

The visualization offered above is the largest weakly connected component of the citation network of the United States Supreme Court (1800-1829). Each time slice visualizes the aggregate network as of the year in question.

In our paper entitled Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks, we offer some thoughts on the early SCOTUS citation network.  In reviewing the visual above note ….“[T]he Court’s early citation practices indicate a general absence of references to its own prior decisions. While the court did invoke well-established legal concepts, those concepts were often originally developed in alternative domains or jurisdictions. At some level, the lack of self-reference and corresponding reliance upon external sources is not terribly surprising. Namely, there often did not exist a set of established Supreme Court precedents for the class of disputes which reached the high court. Thus, it was necessary for the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, seen through the prism of its case-to-case citation network, to transition through a loading phase. During this loading phase, the largest weakly connected component of the graph generally lacked any meaningful clustering. However, this sparsely connected graph would soon give way, and by the early 1820’s, the largest weakly connected component displayed detectable structure.”

What are the elements of the network?

What are the labels?

To help orient the end-user, the visualization highlights several important decisions of the United States Supreme Court offered within the relevant time period:

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803) we labeled as ”Marbury”
Murray v. The Charming Betsey, 6 U.S. 64 (1804) we labeled as “Charming Betsey”
Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, 14 U.S. 304 (1816) we labeled as “Martin’s Lessee”
The Anna Maria, 15 U.S. 327 (1817) we labeled as “Anna Maria”
McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819) we labeled as “McCulloch”

Why do cases not always enter the visualization when they are decided?

As we are interested in the core set of cases, we are only visualizing the largest weakly connected component of the United States Supreme Court citation network. Cases are not added until they are linked to the LWCC.  For example, Marbury v. Madison is not added to the visualization until a few years after it is decided.

How do I best view the visualization?

Given this is a high-definition video, it may take few seconds to load.  We believe that it is worth the wait.  In our view, the video is best consumed (1) Full Screen (2) HD On (3) Scaling Off.

Where can I find related papers?

Here is a non-exhaustive list of related scholarship:

Michael Bommarito, Daniel Katz, Jon Zelner & James Fowler, Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks, Physica A __ (2010 Forthcoming).

Yonatan Lupu & James Fowler, The Strategic Content Model of Supreme Court Opinion Writing, APSA 2009 Toronto Meeting Paper.

Michael Bommarito, Daniel Katz & Jon Zelner, Law as a Seamless Web? Comparison of Various Network Representations of the United States Supreme Court Corpus (1791-2005) in Proceedings of the 12th Intl. Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (2009).

Frank Cross, Thomas Smith & Antonio Tomarchio, The Reagan Revolution in the Network of Law, 57 Emory L. J. 1227 (2008).

James Fowler & Sangick Jeon, The Authority of Supreme Court Precedent, 30 Soc. Networks 16 (2008).

Elizabeth Leicht, Gavin Clarkson, Kerby Shedden & Mark Newman, Large-Scale Structure of Time Evolving Citation Networks, 59 European Physics Journal B 75 (2007).

Thomas Smith, The Web of the Law, 44 San Diego L.R. 309 (2007).

James Fowler, Timothy R. Johnson, James F. Spriggs II, Sangick Jeon & Paul J. Wahlbeck, Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court, 15 Political Analysis, 324 (2007).

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The Development of Structure in the Citation Network of the United States Supreme Court

clsadmin

The Development of Structure in the Citation Network of the United States Supreme Court — Now in HD! from Computational Legal Studies on Vimeo.

What are some of the key takeaway points?

(1) The Supreme Court’s increasing reliance upon its own decisions over the 1800-1830 window.

(2) The important role of maritime/admiralty law in the early years of the Supreme Court’s citation network.  At least with respect to the Supreme Court’s citation network, these maritime decisions are the root of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence.

(3) The increasing centrality of decisions such as Marbury v. Madison, Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee to the overall network.

The Development of Structure in the SCOTUS Citation Network

The visualization offered above is the largest weakly connected component of the citation network of the United States Supreme Court (1800-1829). Each time slice visualizes the aggregate network as of the year in question.

In our paper entitled Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks, we offer some thoughts on the early SCOTUS citation network.  In reviewing the visual above note ….“[T]he Court’s early citation practices indicate a general absence of references to its own prior decisions. While the court did invoke well-established legal concepts, those concepts were often originally developed in alternative domains or jurisdictions. At some level, the lack of self-reference and corresponding reliance upon external sources is not terribly surprising. Namely, there often did not exist a set of established Supreme Court precedents for the class of disputes which reached the high court. Thus, it was necessary for the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, seen through the prism of its case-to-case citation network, to transition through a loading phase. During this loading phase, the largest weakly connected component of the graph generally lacked any meaningful clustering. However, this sparsely connected graph would soon give way, and by the early 1820’s, the largest weakly connected component displayed detectable structure.”

What are the elements of the network?

What are the labels?

To help orient the end-user, the visualization highlights several important decisions of the United States Supreme Court offered within the relevant time period:

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803) we labeled as “Marbury”
Murray v. The Charming Betsey, 6 U.S. 64 (1804) we labeled as “Charming Betsey”
Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, 14 U.S. 304 (1816) we labeled as “Martin’s Lessee”
The Anna Maria, 15 U.S. 327 (1817) we labeled as “Anna Maria”
McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819) we labeled as “McCulloch”

Why do cases not always enter the visualization when they are decided?

As we are interested in the core set of cases, we are only visualizing the largest weakly connected component of the United States Supreme Court citation network. Cases are not added until they are linked to the LWCC.  For example, Marbury v. Madison is not added to the visualization until a few years after it is decided.

How do I best view the visualization?

Those interested in viewing the full screen video—click on the full screen icon contained in the Vimeo bottom banner.  Check out the NEW Hi-Def (HD) version of the video!