Excerpt

The law is a textual enterprise—it is through the written word that legislatures, executive bodies, and judges make the law. The study of the law requires interacting with that text by reading statutes, regulations, judicial opinions, or other legal sources. For hundreds of years, the process of reading the law began by picking up a book. With the digitization of massive corpora of legal documents, advances in computer hardware, machine learning, and natural language processing techniques have made legal documents a form of “big data.” As a consequence, a new form of “reading”—grounded in quantitative analysis and mathematics—has taken hold. This new form of reading is poised to change how the law is studied and understood by providing fresh perspectives on old questions and spurring entirely new research agendas.

Distant Reading the Law

It is now common for cultural artifacts—be they texts, images, objects, or even cities—to be represented in digital form (Jones 2013). Some artifacts are generated natively as digital, such as online literary magazines, newspapers, or videos. Others are transformed from the physical to the digital, as occurs when a paper text is scanned, and still others exist as representations of an underlying, perhaps lost, physical artifact in the world, such as a virtual reality reconstruction of portions of Ancient Rome. Regardless, when realized in digital form, cultural objects become a form of data that can be subject to analysis through the tools and techniques of computer science, statistics, and mathematics.1 This change in form allows for quantitative analysis of phenomena that have, to date, largely been the exclusive province of qualitative methods. The analysis of large bodies of text is one such realm.

Document organization and retrieval is perhaps among the most familiar of the success stories of such work (Salton, Wong, and Yang 1975; Berry 2004; Berry and Castellanos 2008). Less familiar has been the use of related ideas to understand broad trends in textual corpora where large-scale temporal patterns in a collection of documents are of interest. Literary scholar Franco Moretti (2013) invented the term “distant reading” to characterize the growing use of quantitative tools to study literary texts.

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