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Law as Data: Computation, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis
In recent years, the digitization of legal texts and developments in the fields of statistics, computer science, and data analytics have opened entirely new approaches to the study of law. This volume explores the new field of computational legal analysis, an approach marked by its use of legal texts as data. The emphasis herein is work that pushes methodological boundaries, either by using new tools to study longstanding questions within legal studies or by identifying new questions in response to developments in data availability and analysis.
By using the text and underlying data of legal documents as the direct objects of quantitative statistical analysis, Law as Data introduces the legal world to the broad range of computational tools already proving themselves relevant to law scholarship and practice, and highlights the early steps in what promises to be an exciting new approach to studying the law.
By using the text and underlying data of legal documents as the direct objects of quantitative statistical analysis, Law as Data introduces the legal world to the broad range of computational tools already proving themselves relevant to law scholarship and practice, and highlights the early steps in what promises to be an exciting new approach to studying the law.
526 pages, Paperback
Published May 29, 2019
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June 22, 2019
I'm a big nerd about pulling insight from unstructured data, so the idea of using computers to analyze the law is naturally very appealing to me. And Law as Data starts out strong by setting the stage of where the field is at now and where we can expect it to go soon. I will say that this relies a lot on the reader understanding causal inference / the credibility revolution - while I personally found this to be refreshingly comfortable without explaining all the background, I would definitely recommend reading The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect before reading this one.
After some really solid scene setting, we're left with a bunch of case studies of variable quality. Some of them are overstating weak findings, while others have some pretty staggering implications. I do sort of wish for a book structure where the findings are put in front and the methods were all sorted in one big appendix, or something - it can be pretty mind numbing to have a book where so much of it is minute technical details about implementation that doesn't substantially affect how you should interpret the findings. I would definitely read these again if I was doing similar machine learning work, but I don't think I would ever read this cover to cover like a regular book again. This is more like a few excellent essays that a kindly professor put in front of a binder of academic papers.
Still, if you're not in the mood for the mathy stuff you can tune it out and still follow along with the papers, so I definitely recommend this for anyone interested in politics or law. Just make sure you know what you're getting in to - this isn't quite as readable as a single book by a single author would be.
After some really solid scene setting, we're left with a bunch of case studies of variable quality. Some of them are overstating weak findings, while others have some pretty staggering implications. I do sort of wish for a book structure where the findings are put in front and the methods were all sorted in one big appendix, or something - it can be pretty mind numbing to have a book where so much of it is minute technical details about implementation that doesn't substantially affect how you should interpret the findings. I would definitely read these again if I was doing similar machine learning work, but I don't think I would ever read this cover to cover like a regular book again. This is more like a few excellent essays that a kindly professor put in front of a binder of academic papers.
Still, if you're not in the mood for the mathy stuff you can tune it out and still follow along with the papers, so I definitely recommend this for anyone interested in politics or law. Just make sure you know what you're getting in to - this isn't quite as readable as a single book by a single author would be.
Displaying 1 of 1 review