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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. …

Understanding the sources of complexity in legal systems is a matter long considered by legal commentators. In tackling the question, scholars have applied various approaches including descriptive, theoretical and, in some cases, empirical analysis. The list is long but would certainly include work such as Long & Swingen (1987), Schuck (1992), White (1992), Kaplow (1995), Epstein (1997), Kades (1997), Wright (2000), Holz (2007) and Bourcier & Mazzega (2007). Notwithstanding the significant contributions made by these and other scholars, we argue that an extensive empirical inquiry into the complexity of the law still remains to be undertaken. While certainly just a slice of the broader legal universe, the United States Code represents a substantively important body of law familiar to both legal scholars and laypersons. In published form, the Code spans many volumes. Those volumes feature hundreds of thousands of provisions and tens of millions of words. The United States Code is obviously complicated, however, measuring its size and complexity has proven be non-trivial. In our paper entitled, A Mathematical Approach to the Study of the United States Code we hope to contribute to the effort by formalizing the United States Code as a mathematical object with ahierarchical structure, a citation network and an associated text function that projects language …

In our original post on Title 26, we displayed every subtitle of Title 26, A through K, down to the section level.  We did not, however, display the elements of the code below the section level.  For example, our prior visualization stops at §501 and does not distinguish between §501(c)(3) and §501(c)(2). This is a function of the size of Title 26, as the full labeled image is too large to render and distribute over the Internet. However, working with only a subset of Title 26 of the United States Code, we can provide a full depth zoomable visualization. We’ve chosen to highlight – Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter P: Capital Gains and Losses as this section well represents the structural complexity of the code. Despite only displaying a single subchapter without any Treasury Regs or SEC guidance, there are over 1,711 citable elements in this visual. If you look closely you can see the labels for each and every piece of this subchapter, including §1221(b)(2)(A)(ii), which defines “hedging transactions” (e.g., swaps) for the purpose of the tax code: “to manage risk of interest rate or price changes or currency fluctuations with respect to borrowings made or to be made, or ordinary …