Faro and Lettieri: “Law and Computational Social Science”: Special issue of Rivista “Informatica e diritto”

Dr. Sebastiano Faro of ITTIG-CNR and Dr. Nicola Lettieri of ISFOL, University of Sannio, Benevento, and University of Salerno, have edited the new issue of Rivista Informatica e diritto, a special issue on the theme of “Law and Computational Social Science”.

Click here for abstracts of articles in Italian and English.

Here are the contents, with links to abstracts:

• Sebastiano Faro, Nicola Lettieri: Walking Finelines Between Law and Computational Social Science
• Orlando Roselli: The Ever Changing Legal Dimension and the Controversial Notions of Law and Science
• Domenico Parisi: Robotic Societies and Law: A Plea for a Robotic and Simulation Science of Legal Phenomena
• Bruce Edmonds: What Social Simulation Might Tell Us about How Law Works
• Klaus G. Troitzsch: Legislation, Regulatory Impact Assessment and Simulation
• Cristiano Castelfranchi: Cognitivizing “Norms”. Norm Internalization and Processing
• Federico Cecconi, Giulia Andrighetto, Rosaria Conte: How Social Norms Can Make the World More Regular and Better
• Pietro Terna: Learning Agents and Decisions: New Perspectives
• Nicola Lettieri, Domenico Parisi: Exploring the Effects of Sanctions on Damaging Actions Through Artificial Societies: A Simulation Model
• Luigi Bonaventura, Andrea Consoli: Priorities for Backlog of Criminal Cases Pending in Courts: A Computational Agent-based Model
• Fabrizio Caccavale: Perspectives of the Computational Approach as a Method for Criminological Research
• Federico Cecconi: Simulating Crime: Models, Methods, Tools
• Valentina Punzo: Agent-based Approach to Crime and Criminal Justice Policy Analysis
• Nicolas S. Malleson, Andrew J. Evans, Alison J. Heppenstall, Linda M. See: The Leeds Burglary Simulator
• Migle Laukyte: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Multi-agent Systems: Bridging the Gap between Law and Computer Science
• Deborah De Felice, Giovanni Giuffrida, Giuseppe Giura, Vilhelm Verendel, Calogero G. Zarba: Information Extraction and Social Network Analysis of Criminal Sentences. A Sociological and Computational Approach
• Nicola Lettieri, Delfina Malandrino, Raffaele Spinelli: Text and (Social) Network Analysis as Investigative Tools: A Case Study
• Guglielmo Feis: Network Analysis Formalism and the Construction of a Traceability System for Payments. A Sketch of Its Legal and Sociological Aspects
• Tamara Bellone, Francesco Fiermonte, Chiara Porporato: From “Free Information” to Its (Geo)referencing and Analisys: The ‘Costs’ of Open Source
• Guido Migliaccio: Computational Sciences, Business Management, Accounting and Law: Potential Intersections
• Ernesto Fabiani: Law and Computational Social Science: Brief Notes of a Civil Procedure Law Scholar

Palmirani et al., eds.: AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems: Papers from AICOL III

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani, Professor Dr. Ugo Pagallo, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas, and Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor, have edited a new book entitled AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems – Models and Ethical Challenges for Legal Systems, Legal Language and Legal Ontologies, Argumentation and Software Agents (Springer, 2012).

The book contains revised selected papers from International Workshop AICOL-III, Held as Part of the 25th IVR Congress, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, August 15-16, 2011.

HT Professor Palmirani

Winkels et al. on Determining Authority of Dutch Case Law

Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels of the Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam, Jelle De Ruyter of the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law, and Henryk Kroese of the University of Amsterdam – Faculty of Natural Science, Mathematics and Information Science, have published Determining Authority of Dutch Case Law, in K. M. Atkinson (Ed.), Legal Knowledge and Information Systems - JURIX 2011: The Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference (pp. 103-112) (IOS Press, 2011). Here is the abstract:

In this paper we present the results of two studies to see whether the analysis of the network of citations between cases can be used as an indication of the relevance and authority in the Dutch legal system. Fowler e.a. [here and here] have shown such results for the US common law system, but given the different status of case law in continental tradition it is not clear whether this will hold in the Netherlands. Moreover, we introduce a way to validate the results using selections made by human experts for legal education. We discuss the results and conclude that network analysis of cases is a useful tool for legal research.

Slides Available for Katz and Bommarito: Network Analysis and Law: Introductory Tutorial

Slides have been posted for “Network Analysis and Law: Introductory Tutorial”, taught by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law and Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies, on 13 December 2011 in Vienna, Austria, at JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Here is the outline of the tutorial:

Network Analysis: An Extended Primer

Advanced Network Science Topics

• Community Detection
• ERGM / P* Models
• Social Epidemiology

Network Analysis and Law

• Legal Elites
• Diffusion and Other Related Processes
• Legal Doctrine and Legal Rules

The Frontier of Network Analysis and Law

• Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks
• Dynamic Community Detection
• The Judicial Collaborative Filter (Judge Aided Info Retrieval)

For more information, please see the slides.

HT @computational.

Boulet, Mazzega, and Bourcier on A Network Approach to the French System of Legal Codes Part 1

Dr. Romain Boulet of UMR ESPACE-DEV, IRD; Dr. Pierre Mazzega of UnB/IRD and UPS (OMP), CNRS, IRD; and Dr. Danièle Bourcier of CERSA CNRS, have published A network approach to the French system of legal codes—part I: analysis of a dense network, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 19, 333-355 (2011). Here is the abstract:

We explore one aspect of the structure of a codified legal system at the national level using a new type of representation to understand the strong or weak dependencies between the various fields of law. In Part I of this study, we analyze the graph associated with the network in which each French legal code is a vertex and an edge is produced between two vertices when a code cites another code at least one time. We show that this network distinguishes from many other real networks from a high density, giving it a particular structure that we call concentrated world and that differentiates a national legal system (as considered with a resolution at the code level) from small-world graphs identified in many social networks. Our analysis then shows that a few communities (groups of highly wired vertices) of codes covering large domains of regulation are structuring the whole system. Indeed we mainly find a central group of influent codes, a group of codes related to social issues and a group of codes dealing with territories and natural resources. The study of this codified legal system is also of interest in the field of the analysis of real networks. In particular we examine the impact of the high density on the structural characteristics of the graph and on the ways communities are searched for. Finally we provide an original visualization of this graph on an hemicyle-like plot, this representation being based on a statistical reduction of dissimilarity measures between vertices. In Part II (a following paper) we show how the consideration of the weights attributed to each edge in the network in proportion to the number of citations between two vertices (codes) allows deepening the analysis of the French legal system.