Excerpt

How can scholars assess the differences between legal systems? A primary way for legal comparativists to answer this question has been to sort legal systems into different “families.” Some distinctions are quite clear and uncontroversial, such as the fundamental difference between common law systems (which are largely made up of former English colonies) and civil law systems. And there is general agreement that the French and German traditions are the primary influences in civil law. But things get murky quickly. While colonization played a central role in shaping the legal systems of many countries, many of these nations have sought to distinguish themselves after independence. To further confuse matters, some countries that were not subject to colonization made independent choices about their legal systems by borrowing from multiple traditions.

The diversity of legal systems has made it difficult for researchers to reach consensus on the appropriate grouping of legal families. For traditional legal comparativists, who generally use qualitative methods to categorize legal systems, there are debates about whether comparisons should be made at a macro or micro level. Moreover, the time-consuming nature of the qualitative inquiries means that it is difficult to compare a large number of legal systems. Economists have also relied on groupings of legal systems in the “legal origins” literature. This line of research seeks to attribute development to the use of certain legal systems. Doing so requires categorizing legal systems, which has generally been done using relatively blunt variables. These include whether a country uses common law or civil law and, for former colonies, the colonizing country. While these simple distinctions allow for a large number of comparisons, there have been significant challenges to this work: scholars have struggled to determine the drivers of the relevant relationships, tease out important differences, and develop meaningful and defensible classification schemes.

In this chapter, we propose a method that can capture some of the subtlety and detail that distinguishes legal systems in a way that can scale. This approach uses the digitization and machine reading of legal codes to determine the network structure of these bodies of text. The network structure depends on the use of crossreferences contained within the code. We then propose to compare legal systems by using a series of metrics that analyze the similarity of network structures between codes. These comparisons can be used to validate existing categorizations, such as the proposition that the legal systems of countries that are subject to the same colonizer are more similar than those of countries subject to a different colonizer. This method can also allow more nuanced comparisons between countries. Specifically, network structure can be used to construct continuous measures to assess the similarity of legal systems. Measures of this sort should allow more refined analysis of the “legal origins” hypothesis and also hold the promise of reorienting conventional conceptions concerning the relationships between legal systems.

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