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.

Bommarito & Katz on Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The United States Code

Michael J. Bommarito II and Daniel Martin Katz, both of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems and creators of the Computational Legal Studies blog, have posted a new visualization entitled Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The United States Code. The visualization is part of their new paper, A Mathematical Approach to the Study of the United States Code, forthcoming in Physica A, Vol. 389, 2010.

The authors describe the visualization as follows:

With this representation in place, it is possible to measure the size of the Code using it various structural features such as its vertices V and its edges E. It is possible to measure the full Code at various time snapshots and consider whether the Code is growing. Using a limited window of data, we observe growth in not only the size of the code but also its network of dependancies (i.e. its citation network). [...]

Of course, growth alone is not precisely analogous. Indeed, while we believe in general the size of the code tends to contribute to “complexity” that some additional measure or measures are needed. Thus, our paper conducts various structural measurements such number of sections, section sizes, etc.

In addition, we use the well known Shannon Entropy measure (borrowed from Information Theory) to evaluate the “complexity” of the message passing / language contained therein.

WebLaws.org: What’s Next for This New Resource from Robb Shecter?

WebLaws.org is a new, free legal information resource — with added functions available for a fee — providing access to the statutes of multiple U.S. states, and created by Robb Shecter.

Robb is well known as the developer of OregonLaws.org, the free access to law site for Oregon statutes, legal news, and Web services that improve access to those sources, including research trails, a corpus search, a legal glossary, and a “Law Robot” that automatically retrieves full text of statutes in response to a citation number.

Robb accepts suggestions for developing the site here, and discusses his development approach in his post The Recipe for Better Legal Information Services, at the VoxPopuLII blog, published by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

Currently, WebLaws.org features the following content and services:

• All of the content and services of OregonLaws.org;
• New York statutes and legal news, with a research trail;
• An archive/public repository, that currently contains five editions of the Oregon Revised Statutes; and
• An API.

Last week, Robb kindly shared with me his plans for further development of WebLaws.org. In the coming months, he hopes to add the following content and functions to the site:

• Cross-jurisdiction searching via an LCSH [Library of Congress Subject Heading]-based ontology. Each jd [jurisdiction] will have a mapping or adapter between its terms and the LCSH allowing meaningful semantic searches across many states. There’ll also be an optional LCSH-centric view of the site for people browising jd’s that they’re not familiar with.
• Adding LCSH’s to the legal glossary to allow subject-based filtering, and context for the result.
• Finishing the NY site ["New York laws, statutes, and news"] to the same level of quality as Oregon [OregonLaws.org].
• Figuring out a way to adequately present CA [California] laws even though the legislature doesn’t provide “leadlines” (titles) of the actual sections.
• Creating a feed for NY listing upcoming changes to the statutes.
• Creating an archive of older NY statute revisions.
• Creating 3–4 iPhone apps: legal glossary, Oregon statutes, NY statutes, etc. I’ll post a couple screen shots to my blog.
• Developing more web APIs to give access to the content. (I currently have one available, which I’ve listed at Programmable Web: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/weblaws.
• Creating subject-area micro-sites (e.g., Oregon bicycle law) which would be edited by attorneys and cull together references to legal resources.
• Better automate the inclusion of relevant secondary sources.
• Visualization of the structure of laws — this is something I got started with, but it hasn’t been a necessity. I’ve got the ontologies fully OO modeled; I just need to find some good vis. libraries.

Many thanks to Robb for sharing these exciting plans, with which we wish him much success.

Katz & Bommarito’s Visualization of the Complete United States Code

Daniel Martin Katz & Michael Bommarito, both of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems, have completed their visualization of the structure of the entire United States Code, published at their Computational Legal Studies blog. This is another example of their exciting and innovative work — discussed in this earlier post — respecting the graphic depiction of quantitative legal information.