Workshop: Computerized Content Analysis and the Law

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

At its core, the study of the law -- broadly conceived -- is concerned with texts: statutes, constitutions, judicial opinions, and briefs. These texts contain the rules, judgments, and arguments that make up and shape the law. Ironically, quantitative empirical scholarship on the law has largely ignored these documents, and with good reason. To date, few tools have been available that would allow systematic analysis of a large number of legal texts in a cost-effective manner. In the fields of computational linguistics and computer science, however, there have been important advances in automated content analysis. In these disciplines, tools have been developed that permit the analysis of patterns and interrelationships in a text. Unfortunately, political scientists -- and scholars of judicial politics in particular -- are largely unaware of these methodological tools. The central purpose of the proposed conference is to overcome this gap between the disciplines. The conference will bring together political scientists, legal scholars, computational linguists, and computer scientists to explore how modern automated content analysis tools might be used to analyze complex legal documents.