Tag: network science

-

Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law – Published Today in Scientific Reports (Nature Research)

Daniel Katz

Access the Full Article via Scientific Reports (Nature Research). This article is part of a special compilation for Scientific Reports devoted to Social Physics.

ABSTRACT: While many 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, based on the explicit cross-references between legal rules, 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. Hence, our findings highlight the power of document network analysis for understanding the evolution of law and its relationship with society.

It has been a real pleasure to work with my transatlantic colleagues Corinna Coupette (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), Janis Beckedorf (Heidelberg University) and Dirk Hartung (Bucerius Law School). We have other projects also in the works — so stay tuned!

-

Network Analysis and Machine Learning in Law Conference – University of Oslo Faculty of Law – Call for Papers

clsadmin

Call For Papers:  “The empirical turn in legal scholarship has intensified with the integration of a new quantitative and computational methods. In our second annual workshop on law and social science methods, we call for papers on two increasingly popular approaches: network science and machine learning. We are especially interested in papers that seek to deepen the understanding of these methods or apply them to doctrinal or interdisciplinary questions in areas such as criminology, international law, corporate Law and sustainable development.

The Keynote Speaker for the workshop is Dan Katz, Illinois Tech – Chicago Kent College of Law, who has been a pioneer in the use of both methods in understanding and predicting the behavior of the US Supreme Court and advancing the field of legal technology”

Abstracts of approximately 200 words should be submitted to Martin Nøkleberg and Hanna Ahlström by  22 August 2018.

Acceptance of papers will be notified by 1 September 2018.
Papers should be submitted by 24 September 2018.
Workshop 10-11 October 2018 at the University of Olso 

-

Revisiting Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks – Published in Physica A

clsadmin


I was revisiting some of our old stuff for this Oslo event -early on for us on our #LegalPhysics #LegalAnalytics path – published in Physica A – “By applying our sink clustering method, we obtain a dendrogram of the network’s largest weakly connected component shown in Fig. 4. However, despite their general topical relatedness, these two clusters of cases engage substantively different sub-questions, and are thus appropriately divided into separate clusters. While not a major focus of the docket of the modern court, the early court elaborated a number of important legal concepts through the lens of these admiralty decisions. For example, the red group of cases engages questions of presidential power and the laws of war, as well as general interpretations of the Prize Acts of 1812. Meanwhile, the blue cluster engages questions surrounding tort liability, jurisdiction, and the burden of proof.”