Verrier: Visualizations of the French Civil Code

Jacques Verrier has posted two visualizations of the French Code civil:

• Code civil – Cartographie [a video showing the evolution of the Code civil by means of network graphs]
• Code civil des Français [a network graph of the structure of the Code civil linked to the full text of the code]

According to the Code civil des Français “Aide” screen, the source of that visualization is the version of the Code civil that is available on Legifrance, the official French open legislation service. Verrier continues:

Un noeud représente un texte de loi (un article, une loi, un décret ou même une ordonnance) et deux textes sont connectés si l’un cite l’autre, le modifie, ou le créé. Le graphe contient donc tous les articles du code civil plus d’autres textes juridiques qui s’y rapportent. [...] Ce graphe est une exemple de réseau “invariant d’échelle” ou la distribution des liens suit une loi de puissance.

According to the Code civil des Français “Aide” screen:

Le graphe a été spatialisé avec Gephi et l’interface utilise sigmajs et jQuery.

These visualizations were presented at OLDP 2012: Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics, held 6-7 July 2012, at Sciences Po, Paris, France.

For more information, please see the post entitled Lexmex : “voir la loi” at L’Atelier de Cartographie, and the Code civil des Français “Aide” screen.

It may be useful to compare these visualizations with those created by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of the Michigan State University College of Law and Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies:

• The Development of Structure in the Citation Network of the United States Supreme Court
• Measuring the Complexity of the Law : The United States Code
• The Structure and Complexity of the United States Code
• The Structure of the United States Code

HT @LaNetscouade.

New Discussion: Bommarito on Hands-on Examples of Legal Search

Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies has started a discussion entitled Hands-on Examples of Legal Search, in the LinkedIn group of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL).

The examples are Mr. Bommarito’s recent work describing cloud-based approaches to legal information retrieval and eDiscovery using AWS CloudSearch (here, here, and here), and information retrieval of statutes using Lucene.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Bommarito on AWS CloudSearch for eDiscovery: Generating AWS CloudSearch SDF for Emails

Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies has posted Generating AWS CloudSearch SDF for Emails, and “Google” for subpoenaed emails: AWS CloudSearch for eDiscovery, on his blog.

In these posts, Mr. Bommarito proposes using AWS CloudSearch for ediscovery, and provides a worked example, which he describes as follows:

I thought I’d share a proof-of-concept email parser based on the Enron email dataset. The Python script below takes a directory of RFC822 email messages and returns an AWS CloudSearch JSON SDF with fields from the Date, From, To, Subject, and Body fields of the email. There is no special handling for attachments or encoding in this example, but it can be used to populate a CloudSearch domain from the Enron emails. Sample usage below, as well as the output sample here. [...]

For more information, including source code, please see the complete posts: Generating AWS CloudSearch SDF for Emails, and “Google” for subpoenaed emails: AWS CloudSearch for eDiscovery.

Bommarito on Updated Michigan Compiled Laws (MCL) XML

Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies has posted Updated Michigan Compiled Laws (MCL) XML, on his blog.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

Last August, I released an XML copy of the Michigan Compiled Laws (MCL). [...] In preparation for some upcoming projects, I’ve since updated both the XML and HTML versions. You can consume these documents in the following ways:

• In one giant HTML file over the web.
• In one giant HTML file on your desktop via ZIP or BZ2.
• In one giant XML file on your desktop via ZIP or BZ2.

Please feel free to use, improve, or comment!

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT Michael Bommarito.

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.

Katz, Bommarito et al., Legal Language Explorer

[NOTE: Updated 19 December 2011 to link to Mr. Bommarito's post describing the development of Legal Language Explorer.]

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law, Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies, and colleagues, have launched Legal Language Explorer, a new, free, Web-based software application that performs Google N-gram word counts on U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

Click here for the JURIX 2011 presentation slides describing the service.

Mr. Bommarito has described the development of the service in a new post, entitled Building Legal Language Explorer: Interactivity and drill-down, noSQL and SQL

One of the notable features of Legal Language Explorer is that it analyzes full-text court decisions published free on the Web by Public.Resource.Org, as part of the Law.gov legal open government data movement. Katz and Bommarito have previously argued that making more full-text legal resources available free on the Web would enable researchers to build new software tools for processing those resources, and to generate new knowledge through innovative analysis of those resources. Legal Language Explorer exemplifies this kind of software innovation fostered by open legal data, while the authors’ new paper, entitled Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the ‘Evolution’ of Legal Language, illustrates the kinds of original research that may arise from analysis of such data.

Katz and Bommarito to Teach Network Analysis and Law Tutorial @ Jurix 2011

A tutorial on “Network Analysis and Law”, taught by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law and Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies, will be held 13 December 2011 in Vienna, Austria, at JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Here are the goals of the tutorial:

• To introduce a variety of concepts from complex systems and network science
• To outline potential applications of network science in legal studies and positive legal theory
• To highlight possible uses of network metadata to enrich legal informatics sub-fields such as information retrieval
• To examine the application of various network based epidemiological / diffusion models
• To introduce participants to various theoretical and empirical network science software platforms

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT @computational.

Bommarito on 21st Century Legal Informatics

Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies has begun a new series of posts entitled 21st Century Legal Informatics.

The initial post in the series presents Mr. Bommarito’s visions of the role of technology in law practice in the 20th, 21st, and 22nd centuries. He views the current century as a transitional period between a library-based model of legal research, practice, and publishing, and a future era in which artificial intelligence applications perform most functions of lawyers.

Mr. Bommarito plans to demonstrate his conception of the 21st century as transitional phase in legal informatics, through upcoming posts on “e-Discovery, search, and legal rule exploration.”

New: XML Copy of the Michigan Compiled Laws (MCL), by Michael Bommarito

Michael J. Bommarito II of Systematic Global Macro and Computational Legal Studies has posted an XML version of Michigan Compiled Laws — the official codification of Michigan legislation — for bulk download.

According to his post, Mr. Bommarito also “improved the underlying data [of the code] by adding tags and correcting indentation as best as possible.”

Mr. Bommarito says that this effort was prompted by Ari Hershowitz’s effort to organize a hackathon to create better digital versions of California legislation.

For bulk access to the XML version of Michigan Compiled Laws, a sample of the XML, or for more information about this project, please see Mr. Bommarito’s entire post.

New on VoxPopuLII: Poast, Katz, and Bommarito on the Electronic World Treaty Index

The Electronic World Treaty Index is a new post by Paul Poast of the University of Michigan Department of Political Science, Daniel Martin Katz of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems and Computational Legal Studies, and Michael J. Bommarito II of Systematic Global Macro and Computational Legal Studies, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, the authors describe the content and functionality of The World Treaty Index (WTI), a new, updated, digital version of Peter Rohn’s pioneering reference source.

The new digital World Treaty Index includes metadata for nearly 75,000 treaties that entered into force in the twentieth century. Users may search by numerous access points, including citation; title keyword; party name (including countries and organizations); “Correlates of War” country code; subject; whether the treaty is unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral; and signature date.

Visualizations and data export are among the notable functionality in the new digital WTI. Display results include a visualization “of the distribution of the requested treaties over the requested time period,” a function that highlights the data visualization expertise of the founders of Computational Legal Studies. In addition, users may export search results for bilateral treaties, and may download metadata for multilateral treaties in bulk, in both instances in .csv format, for use in standard statistical packages. These features render WTI both a legal reference source and a valuable data set for research in political science and law.

In the coming months, the authors plan to extend WTI’s coverage through 2011, add metadata about “treaty terminations and renegotiations,” enhance the multilateral treaties interface, and add links to full text of treaties.

This post should be of interest to researchers in international law and political science, legal information professionals, developers of legal information systems, and those who study legal metadata.