More on Computational Legal Science at MIT Media Lab

Dazza Greenwood, JD, of MIT Media Lab, has posted more information about the Computational Legal Science research program at the MIT Media Lab.

Greenwood has redesigned the MIT Media Lab eCitizen page so that it now focuses on the Computational Legal Science program.

The resources listed there now include the following:

A brief video explaining the Computational Legal Science program and the notion of “Legal Physics”, in part using the example of the Massachusetts Fair Information Practices Act;

A tag for “Legal Science” on the eCitizen blog;

Several GitHub repositories related to the program:

• LegalScience: http://ift.tt/1eM9VNe


• LegalPhysics: http://ift.tt/O3pvPu


• System Rules: http://ift.tt/1eM9TVJ


• Legal Agreements: http://ift.tt/O3pxHe


• FIPS (Fair Information Practices Services): http://ift.tt/O3pxHi

If I understand correctly, Greenwood is defining Computational Legal Science as the application of Lazer, Pentland, and colleagues’ (2009) computational social science framework, to law. This involves treating law as data and applying quantitative social-scientific analytic methods to it.

Greenwood defines “Legal Physics” as “the social science that involves the study of legal matters and their motion through space and time, along with related concepts such as resource allocation and enforceability.”

Greenwood has set up a new website called Legal Physics , at http://ift.tt/O3pvPC, but there is not much content there now.

Other recent resources on law and computational social science include:

• Sebastiano Faro and Nicola Lettieri’s special issue of Rivista Informatica e diritto, on the theme of “Law and Computational Social Science”, and their 2012 article, Computational Social Science and its Potential Impact upon Law ;


• Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito and colleagues’ research on Computational Legal Studies ;


• Will Lowe’s 2013 APSA program on New Methods in Legislative Studies ;


• John Sheridan’s work on Big Data and Law, legislative Linked Data, Legislation as Data, and legislative APIs;


• Legal textual analysis papers at the New Directions in Text as Data conferences;


• Monica Palmirani and colleagues’ work on the LegalRuleML and LegalDocumentML and related standards;


• much other recent research in legal informatics, published in such journals as Artificial Intelligence and Law and Journal of Open Access to Law , and in the proceedings of conferences including ICAIL, JURIX, and IRIS, and of workshops including SPLeT (Semantic Processing of Legal Texts).

Filed under: Applications, Projects, Software, Technology developments, Technology tools, Videos Tagged: Computational legal science, Computational Legal Studies, Dazza Greenwood, Law and computational social science, Legal physics, Legal Science, MIT Media Lab



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