This chapter provides an overview of computational text analysis techniques used to study judicial behavior and decision-making. As legal texts become increasingly digitized, scholars can draw on tools from machine learning and natural language processing to convert unstructured texts into quantitative data amenable to empirical analysis. The chapter surveys common methods for representing legal documents and discusses their strengths and weaknesses. Each approach makes tradeoffs between richness of representation and dimensionality reduction. Extracting meaningful data from legal texts requires thoughtful choices about representation and preprocessing. The chapter discusses interpretability, bias, and domain-specific challenges as important considerations when applying text analysis to study courts. Overall, computational text analysis supplements traditional methods and opens new avenues for empirical legal scholarship.
This Essay expounds on the outsized role of private law in governing ownership of new technologies and data. As scholars lament gaps between law and...
Large language models (LLMs) now perform extremely well on many natural language processing tasks. Their ability to convert legal texts to data may...
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The 2024 edition of Selected Intellectual Property, Internet, and Information Law, Statutes, Regulations, and Treaties, edited by Professors Sharon K...
Fifty years ago, federal and state lawmakers called for the regulation of a criminal justice “databank” connecting federal, state, and local agencies...
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This chapter provides an overview of computational text analysis techniques used to study judicial behavior and decision-making. As legal texts become...
Moore v. United States raises the question whether unrealized gains, such as an increase in property value or a stock portfolio, constitute “incomes...
A crucial first step in addressing intimate-image abuse is its proper conceptualization. Intimate-image abuse amounts to a violation of intimate...
Federal administrative agencies are one of the primary policymaking venues in the United States. One of the core features of U.S. administrative...
Research correlating stringency in land-use regulation to low housing supply, high housing costs, and segregation relies on surveys of planners about...
This Article introduces the Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores (JuDJIS), an expert-sourced measure of judicial traits that can locate nearly...
We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...
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Whether constitution-making should be constrained has long been debated, but little is known about whether it is possible. We make several...
National constitutions codify provisions on a wide range of topics, ranging from presidential term limits to the country’s flag. But are all...
Generative AI is already beginning to alter legal practice. If optimistic forecasts prove warranted, how might this technology transform judicial...