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,
Here's a wordcloud of the NFIB et al. v. Sebelius et al. opinion. Very interesting coalitions formation. Healthcare/ACA wordcloud If you're interested in the R and Java code for generating these wordclouds, please see my post on Arizona et al. v. United States from earlier in the week.
While Tsipras and his Syriza coalition have been busy in Greek parliament, the Internet has been a-buzz with speculation that their platform will result in a Greek exit from the Euro currency. This prospect, affectionately dubbed "Grexit" by Citi in February, has been making the rounds on Twitter under the hashtag #grexit. We think the
The NATO summit is currently being held in Chicago, and, as is typical for NATO or G# summits, the streets and tweets are full of dissent. In the spirit of my past investigations of online dissent (#jan25, #25bahman, #12fev, #wiunion, #cn220, #march15), I thought I would investigate the #nonato tag, where Twitter users around
Let's say you've used my Python script to automate the download of a hashtag or search phrase from Twitter (in a Unicode safe way, unlike within R). Now let's say you want to visualize the number of tweets over time. Easy enough - I've also shared this R/ggplot2 code that accomplishes the task. However, let's say
In the last post on AWS CloudSearch, I provided a tutorial on the creation of a simple CloudSearch domain for Supreme Court decisions. This walkthrough described the steps of creating a domain, configuring access policies and indexing, populating the index, and using the search API. We were left with a functioning case search database.
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
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
Out of all the visuals I’ve produced, I think the "coolest" is the three-dimensional U.S. Supreme Court citation network 1080p movie I produced with Dan Katz (close friend, coauthor, and newly minted law professor!). 3D networks, especially dynamic ones, really invoke the "wow" factor. Movies are especially important in dynamic cases too, since without the animation,
