Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier on Big Data and Law

Professor Dr. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the Oxford Internet Institute and Kenneth Neil Cukier of The Economist gave a presentation entitled Big Data — and Its Dark Side, 6 March 2013, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

The presentation concerned their new book entitled Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).

The presentation includes some examples concerning legal data, including an analysis of topics discussed in proceedings of the British House of Commons, a study of the association between the ideology and citation practices of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, and predictive policing.

Bommarito: Visualization of Reading Level Frequency by Congressional Bill Stage

Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies has posted Visualization of Reading Level Frequency by Congressional Bill Stage, on his blog.

Here are excerpts from the post:

Here’s a fun example of how you might use my data on Congressional bill length and complexity. Imagine you want to understand the empirical distribution of Flesch-Kincaid reading level for Congressional bills and how this distribution is related to bill stage. A first step might be to visualize this relationship. [...]

Based on this visualization, you might infer that engrossed bills tend to have less right-skew and have a lower mean reading level. The story behind this might be that Senators and Representatives are less likely to accept legislation they do not understand. To test this, you might run a simple [Kolmogorov-Smirnov] test to see if the introduced bill reading levels are greater than engrossed bill reading levels.

For graphs and sample code, please see the complete post.

Bommarito: Statistics on the Length and Linguistic Complexity of Bills

Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies has posted Statistics on the length and linguistic complexity of bills on his blog.

This post presents a table of statistics on word count, word and sentence length, and Flesch-Kincaid reading level scores for the bills introduced in the 112th U.S. Congress, and a histogram showing the distribution of word counts in those bills.

Mr. Bommarito says that he will “be adding more automated analysis and figures over the next few weeks.”

HT @mbommar.