Last week, I shared that Dan Katz and I had finally published a draft of our paper, Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The U.S. Code. We'd previewed this research on Computational Legal Studies years ago. Since then, we've received great feedback and a number of questions. The most common question, even among legal professionals,
Four years ago, Dan Katz and I began working on a project to measure the complexity of the law. Its genesis was, in every sense, an accident; in order to properly identify citations to the IRC in our VTR empirical review of U.S. Tax Court decisions, we had to deal with the informal, non-Blue
It should be pretty clear by now that two things I'm very interested in are cloud computing and legal informatics. What better way to show it than to put together a simple AWS CloudSearch tutorial using Supreme Court decisions as the context? The steps below should take you through creating a fully functional search
When I put together my original post on the length and complexity of Congressional bills, I was hoping to build forward momentum on the project. The goal was to build a simple, sortable and searchable interface to explore and visualize the data. As usual, however, paying employers and consulting clients got in the way
When someone brings up the empirical study of legal citation, most people think of the work Landes & Posner and Epstein & Martin. If you're really cool, you might even think of Dan and me, who have spent quite awhile analyzing and visualizing Supreme Court citations like those in the 3D 1080p animation below: These studies, including
Later this month, I'll be giving a keynote at a meeting on Law and Computation at the University of Houston. As part of the talk, I'm putting together an example of how I think machine learning and structured data can help build a better legal search engine. For the talk, I'll be building a subset
Let's say that you want to take a set of documents and apply a computational linguistic technique. If your method is based on the bag-of-words model, you probably need to pre-process these documents first by segmenting, tokenizing, stripping, stopwording, and stemming each one (phew, that's a lot of -ing's). In the past, I've relied
What do 88,831 tweets about protest and revolution in Iran look like? Following in the success of Egypt's #jan25 tag, protesters have piled onto the #25bahman tag to discuss Iran's own prospects for "revolution" (25 Bahman 1389 is the Hijri date for February 14, 2011). Curious to analyze and compare these movements, I've started collecting
Algeria and Yemen seem to be pushing a #feb12 revolution hashtag like Egypt's #jan25 tag. In the Egyptian case, the French abbreviation of January didn't vary from the English, and so we really only saw two varieties of the tag - #jan25 and #25jan. I don't have hard numbers on this yet, but from my
