Li et al.: Law is Code: A Software Engineering Approach to Analyzing the United States Code

William P. Li , Pablo Azar , David Larochelle , Phil Hill , and Andrew W. Lo have posted Law is Code: A Software Engineering Approach to Analyzing the United States Code , at SSRN .

Here is the abstract:

The agglomeration of rules and regulations over time has produced a body of legal code that no single individual can fully comprehend. This complexity produces inefficiencies, makes the processes of understanding and changing the law difficult, and frustrates the fundamental principle that the law should provide fair notice to the governed. In this article, we take a quantitative, unbiased, and software-engineering approach to analyze the evolution of the United States Code from 1926 to today. Software engineers frequently face the challenge of understanding and managing large, structured collections of instructions, directives, and conditional statements, and we adapt and apply their techniques to the U.S. Code over time. Our work produces insights into the structure of the U.S. Code as a whole, its strengths and vulnerabilities, and new ways of thinking about individual laws. For example, we identify the first appearance and spread of important terms in the U.S. Code like “whistleblower” and “privacy.” We also analyze and visualize the network structure of certain substantial reforms, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and show how the interconnections of references can increase complexity and create the potential for unintended consequences. Our work is a timely illustration of computational approaches to law as the legal profession embraces technology for scholarship, to increase efficiency, and to improve access to justice.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Research findings Tagged: Affordable Care Act, Andrew W. Lo, David Larochelle, Deep structure of legislation, Dodd-Frank, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Law as data, Law is code, Legal citation networks, Legal terminology networks, Legislation as data, Legislative information systems, Legislative structure, Pablo Azar, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Phil Hill, PPACA, Statutes as data, Structure of legislation, U.S. Code, Visualization of legal citation networks, Visualization of legal information, Visualization of legal terminology networks, Visualization of legislative information, William P. Li



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