Legal Language Explorer

daniel martin katzmichael j bommarito ii

julie seamanadam candeub

eugene agichtein

Presentation @ 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Jurix 2011)

Law is characterized by a relatively small number

of highly influential cases and jurists whose conceptualization of law

comes to dominate

Most Judges and Cases Are Quickly Forgotten

But A Select Few Persist ...

Extreme Skewing is a Typical Feature of Legal Systems

Katz, et al (2011)American Legal Academy

Katz & Stafford (2010)American Federal Judges

Geist (2009)Austrian Supreme Court

Smith (2007)U.S. Supreme Court

Smith (2007)U.S. Law Reviews

Post & Eisen (2000) NY Ct of Appeals Smith (2007)

U.S. Law Reviews

innovative use of language and metaphor is

In Part

How Holmes became “Holmes” and how Posner became “Posner”

Andhow certain cases

came to dominate the rest of the corpus

We Believe

The decision corpus is our archeological record

We Believe

The decision corpus is our archeological record

and that record can be usefully explored using the

tools of computational linguistics

We Want

To Democratize the Exploration of Legal Language ...

We Want

To Democratize the Exploration of Legal Language ...

to folks who are not programmers

We Want

To Democratize the Exploration of Legal Language ...

to folks who are not programmers

to folks who are not technically inclined

We Develop a Simple Web Interface that Leverages

the Visual Cortex

Relies on Our Ability to Engage in

Pattern Detection

To Explore Linguistic Patterns in Large Corpora of Legal

Documents

We Start with the Full Text Corpus of Decisions of the

United States Supreme Court 1791-2005

Develop a N-Gram Based Explorer with a Portal to the Full Text, etc.

From Text to N-Grams...

Generate the N-Gram Mapping

(1) extract the opinion text from each case and store it as a sequence of characters

(2) convert this sequence of characters into a sequence of words through Word Tokenization (Penn Tree Bank Algorithm)

(3) iterate over words in the length M sequence from index 1 to index M + 1 – N

Generate the N-Gram Mapping

Legal Language Explorer:A Brief Tour of The Interface

Go to LegalLanguageExplorer.comAnd Access This Interface

Notice The Default Search Is Interstate Commerce, Railroad, Deed

Notice The Default Search Is Interstate Commerce, Railroad, Deed

For Each Comma Separated Phrase The Frequency Plot Appears Below

For Each Comma Separated Phrase The Frequency Plot Appears Below

Currently Supporting Every U.S. Supreme Court Decision From 1791 - 2005

Currently Supporting Every U.S. Supreme Court Decision From 1791 - 2005

Years Can Be Changed By The End User

Years Can Be Changed By The End User

Click Here to Access Various Advanced Search Features

The Advanced Search Features

Are the Observed Trends a Function of changes in the volume of the case docket?

Normalization allows End User to control for the Size of the Case Docket

Normalization allows End User to control for the Size of the Case Docket

Change the Graph Type By Clicking Here

An Alternative Presentation of the Data

Export the Chart Data

(If You Want to Replot in Stata, Excel, R, etc.)

Export the Chart Data

(If You Want to Replot in Stata, Excel, R, etc.)

The Results(If You Want to Replot in

Stata, Excel, R, etc.)

Access a Case List and Full Text Results

Here are the Returned Results

Download List in Excel

(or any .csv)

Download List in Excel

(or any .csv)

Access the Full Text a Particular

Case

Click Through to Access

Results from BulkResource.org

For More Information - Full Version of the Paper

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1971953

For Implementation

Details (Including the Key Value Storage Method, etc.)

http://www.michaelbommarito.com/blog/2011/12/16/building-legal-language-explorer-interactivity-and-drill-down-nosql-and-sql/

Slides will Be Posted to CLS Bloghttp://computationallegalstudies.com/

This is Only The Beginning Stay Tuned for More in 2012

:)

daniel martin katzmichael j bommarito iijulie seaman adam candeub eugene agichtein