“The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is collaborating with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a multiyear effort to build and test a hypothetical digital currency oriented to central bank uses.” #FedCoin See Full Comments Here.
Updated Version of our Paper — ’Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law’ is now on SSRN / arXiv. It is primarily a methods and measurement paper combining Network Science, Natural Language Processing, etc. to evaluate the growth of the law as a function of time. #LegalComplexity #LegalScience #NLP #NetworkScience #ComplexSystems #DataScience
SSRN LINK: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3602098
arXiv LINK: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.07646
ABSTRACT – While a large number of informal factors influence how people interact, modern societies rely upon law as a primary mechanism to formally control human behaviour. How legal rules impact societal development depends on the interplay between two types of actors: the people who create the rules and the people to which the rules potentially apply. We hypothesise that an increasingly diverse and interconnected society might create increasingly diverse and interconnected rules, and assert that legal networks provide a useful lens through which to observe the interaction between law and society. To evaluate these propositions, we present a novel and generalizable model of statutory materials as multidimensional, time-evolving document networks. Applying this model to the federal legislation of the United States and Germany, we find impressive expansion in the size and complexity of laws over the past two and a half decades. We investigate the sources of this development using methods from network science and natural language processing. To allow for cross-country comparisons over time, we algorithmically reorganise the legislative materials of the United States and Germany into cluster families that reflect legal topics. This reorganisation reveals that the main driver behind the growth of the law in both jurisdictions is the expansion of the welfare state, backed by an expansion of the tax state.
Today I was Quoted in LegalIT Insider discussing GPT-3 and what it might mean for the future of Legal Tech / Legal AI … “There a few demos out there which look promising (but lots of things look good in a demo but are not robust in the end). I think the open question is always to what extent we can project any general advance in NLP to the domain specific challenges here in law-law land … On the positive side, I think every major and even minor advances present opportunities for us here in legal. It took a while but for example you see many of the products in our space taking advantage of Word Embedding [or transformer] methods (Word2Vec, BERT, ELMo, etc.)”
< Go here to see Github / arXiv >
Good to see this in the Science Policy Forum — hope this is going to be a total and complete open source offering (time will tell) …
Yesterday we had our Introductory Pre Session of the Bucerius Legal Tech Essentials … the video for our intro session in now available on YouTube (see video above).
The official first session begins in earnest Monday June 29th Noon US Central / 700pm CEST. It is not too late to join us if you still want to sign up for FREE — https://techsummer.law-school.de/
And the conversation continues at #BuceriusLegalTech …
See you on Monday !
ARE YOU READY? Bucerius Legal Tech Essentials starts this week with our Intro Session on Thursday (regular sessions begin on Monday June 29th) … Over 3200+ Participants from 90+ Countries and the Conversation continues at #BuceriusLegalTech …
You can still Sign up today for FREE — https://techsummer.law-school.de/
Thanks as always to Baker McKenzie for Sponsoring and thank you to our global academic and organizational partners (Stanford CodeX, Chicago Kent & European Legal Technology Association) !
Dirk Hartung and I also would like to also thank our Confirmed Lecturers — Roland Vogl Janis Beckedorf Alma Asay Liam Brown David Perla Daniel W. Linna Jr. Gloria Sanchez J.B. Ruhl How Khang Lim William Henderson Corinna Coupette Shannon Salter Richard Susskind Markus Hartung Mary O’Carroll Daniel B. Rodriguez Mari Sako John Duggan Lucy Endel Bassli Riikka Koulu David Cambria Valérie Saintot …
#legaltech #legalinnovation #legalops #lawschool #legaleducation #law #makelawbetter #legalai #legalprofession
Nice Shoutout (and perhaps a more approachable explanation) for our paper on the Santa Fe Institute Website.
“We propose a generalizable approach for identifying pivotal components across a wide variety of systems,” says author Edward Lee, a Program Postdoctoral Fellow who studies collective behavior at the Santa Fe Institute. “These systems go beyond voting, and include social media (like Twitter), biology (like the statistics of neurons), or finance (like fluctuations of the stock market).”
In the paper, Lee and his co-authors, Daniel Katz (Illinois Tech), Michael Bommarito (Stanford CodeX), and Paul Ginsparg (Cornell University) identify a statistical signature of pivotal components that they then trace to communities on Twitter, votes in the Supreme Court and Congress, and stock indices within financial markets. They find wide diversity in how social systems depend on sensitive points, when such points exist at all.”
Access our Paper – Sensitivity of Collective Outcomes Identifies Pivotal Components in the June 2020 Issue of Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Very excited that our paper – ‘Sensitivity of Collective Outcomes Identifies Pivotal Components’ has now been published in the June Issue of The Journal of the Royal Society Interface. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.0873
Using the information geometry of minimal models from statistical physics, we develop an approach to identify pivotal components in wide variety of systems. We then apply this approach to a wide variety of empirical datasets including political voting, financial markets and social systems. We find remarkable variety from systems dominated by a median-like component to those without any single special component. Other systems (e.g., S&P sector indices) show varying levels of heterogeneity in between these extremes. Our information-geometric approach provides a principled, quantitative framework that may help assess the robustness of collective outcomes to targeted perturbation and compare social institutions, or even biological networks, with one another and across time.
#ComplexSystems #SocialPhysics #InformationGeometry #MedianVoter #Robustness #Sensitivity #Finance #PoliticalVoting
< Read more about this in Fast Company >
Very happy to see this favorable ruling! Coverage in Bloomberg Law. I was one of 36 signatories to one of the Amicus Briefs in the case.
This is wild stuff … makes 2008 look mild. Going to juice the market … we will see where this goes …
In the past week (and weekend) I have taught classes via Zoom for my school (Illinois Tech – Chicago Kent – shown below) as well as University of Toronto Law and IE Law in Spain (early this morning) … Thanks to Chicago Kent Alums – Jason Dirkx (Littler Mendelson) and Amy Monaghan (Perkins Coie) for joining us in the virtual class!
< See Blog Post on Elevate Blog Site >
