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• Published: 30 October 2020

Complex societies and the growth of the law

• Daniel Martin Katz 1 , 2 , 5 ,
• Corinna Coupette   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9151-2092 3 ,
• Janis Beckedorf   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9672-9928 4 &
• Dirk Hartung   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1916-4879 2 , 5  

Scientific Reports volume  10 , Article number:  18737 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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• Complex networks
• Computational science

While many informal factors influence how people interact, modern societies rely upon law as a primary mechanism to formally control human behaviour. How legal rules impact societal development depends on the interplay between two types of actors: the people who create the rules and the people to which the rules potentially apply. We hypothesise that an increasingly diverse and interconnected society might create increasingly diverse and interconnected rules, and assert that legal networks provide a useful lens through which to observe the interaction between law and society. To evaluate these propositions, we present a novel and generalizable model of statutory materials as multidimensional, time-evolving document networks. Applying this model to the federal legislation of the United States and Germany, we find impressive expansion in the size and complexity of laws over the past two and a half decades. We investigate the sources of this development using methods from network science and natural language processing. To allow for cross-country comparisons over time, based on the explicit cross-references between legal rules, we algorithmically reorganise the legislative materials of the United States and Germany into cluster families that reflect legal topics. This reorganisation reveals that the main driver behind the growth of the law in both jurisdictions is the expansion of the welfare state, backed by an expansion of the tax state. Hence, our findings highlight the power of document network analysis for understanding the evolution of law and its relationship with society.

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Introduction

Modern societies rely upon law as the primary mechanism to control their development and manage their conflicts. Through carefully designed rights and responsibilities, institutions and procedures, law can enable humans to engage in increasingly complex social and economic activities. Therefore, law plays an important role in understanding how societies change. To explore the interplay between law and society, we need to study how both co-evolve over time. This requires a firm quantitative grasp of the changes occurring in both domains. But while quantifying societal change has been the subject of tremendous research efforts in fields such as sociology, economics, or social physics for many years 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , much less work has been done to quantify legal change. In fact, legal scholars have traditionally regarded the law as hardly quantifiable, and although there is no dearth of empirical legal studies 7 , 8 , 9 , it is only recently that researchers have begun to apply data science methods to law 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 . To date, there have been relatively few quantitative works that explicitly address legal change 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , and almost no scholarship exists that analyses the time-evolving outputs of the legislative and executive branches of national governments at scale. Unlocking these data sources for the interdisciplinary scientific community will be crucial for understanding how law and society interact.

Our work takes a step towards this goal. As a starting point, we hypothesise that an increasingly diverse and interconnected society might create increasingly diverse and interconnected rules. Lawmakers create, modify, and delete legal rules to achieve particular behavioural outcomes, often in an effort to respond to perceived changes in societal needs. While earlier large-scale quantitative work focused on analysing an individual snapshot of laws enacted by national parliaments 20 , 21 , collections of snapshots offer a window into the dynamic interaction between law and society. Such collections represent complete, time-evolving populations of statutes at the national level. Hence, no sampling is needed for their analysis, and all changes we observe are direct consequences of legislative activity. This feature makes collections of nation-level statutes particularly suitable for investigating temporal dynamics.

To preserve the intended multidimensionality of legal document collections and explore how they change over time, legislative corpora should be modelled as dynamic document networks 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 . In particular, since legal documents are carefully organised and interlinked, their structure provides a more direct window into their content and dynamics than their language: Networks honour the deliberate design decisions made by the document authors and circumvent some of the ambiguity problems that natural language-based approaches inherently face. In this paper, we therefore develop an informed data model for legislative corpora, capturing the richness of legislative data for exploration by social physics. We leverage our data model to analyse the evolution of federal statutes in the United States and Germany. Here, we find extensive growth in legal complexity as a function of volume, interconnectivity, and hierarchical structure of the legislation in both countries—evidence that the highly industrialised countries we study seek to manage behaviour by building increasingly complex bodies of legal rules. Searching for the sources of the growth we observe, we draw on graph clustering techniques to locate those legal topics that contribute most to the complexity increase and trace their development over time. Deriving our information on the content of legislative documents directly from the conscious structural choices made by their drafters, we find that the main driver behind the growth of the law in both the United States and Germany is the expansion of the welfare state, backed by an expansion of the tax state. Beyond this high-level picture, our methodology also enables more fine-grained discoveries—for example, we find that during our observation period, the regulation of natural resources in the United States shifted from exploitation to conservation. Thus, we achieve results that would be hard (or even impossible) to obtain using approaches that leverage only the natural language of legislative documents while keeping the amount of subjective judgements to a minimum. Our work highlights the potential of legal network data and document network analysis for studying the interaction between law and society when viewed through the lens of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) 17 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , and it opens novel research avenues to the interdisciplinary scientific community.

Dynamic network model of legislation

We model 25 years of statutory materials from two advanced industrial countries, the United States and Germany, as time-evolving document networks. To build our original datasets, for the United States, we collect annual snapshots of the United States Code (US Code) from 1994 to 2018 from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives. For Germany, we create a parallel set of yearly snapshots for all federal statutory laws in effect at the beginning of the year in question based on documents from Germany’s primary legal data provider, juris GmbH . For details on our data sources, see Sect. 1 of the Supplementary Information (SI) .

Each individual law or section (that has not been repealed) contains at least some text, and it may contain nested subsections as well as ingoing and outgoing references. For each country and yearly snapshot, we construct a network of all federal statutes. The entities in this network are the structural elements of the statutes we collect, some of which contain text (i.e., the stipulation of a legal rule). These entities are interconnected by inclusion relationships (e.g., a section containing several paragraphs) and cross-references (i.e., the text of an element referencing another element), and they can be sequentially ordered by their labels. Notably, only one level of the inclusion hierarchy in legislative corpora is uniquely sequentially labelled (this is the Section level in the United States and the § or Article level in Germany). We refer to the structural elements in this layer as seqitems . For excerpts from United States law and German law that illustrate their inherent structure, see Sect. 1.3 of the SI .

In the legislative process, the structure of legislative texts is controlled by the administrative officials drafting the rules. Therefore, hierarchy , reference , and sequence within a corpus of legislative documents contain information about the content of the corpus that is less noisy and easier to parse than its language. To unlock this information for large-scale comparative and dynamic analysis, we model a body of legislation at a certain point in time as a document collection following the Document Object Model (DOM) standard 32 (for our domain-specific XML Schema Definition [XSD], see Sect. 2.4 of the  SI ). With each document collection, we associate four graphs as depicted in Fig.  1 a, whose formal definitions are given in " Modelling legislative document collections ". Our simplest graph is the hierarchy graph , which models the inclusion relationships between the structural elements of legal texts. It is a subgraph of the reference graph , which models inclusion and cross-reference relationships. From a network science perspective, the reference graph is perhaps the most intuitive representation of a legislative document collection, and all of our other graphs can be derived from it. The sequence graph contains only the seqitems from the reference graph, which are connected by cross-reference edges and bidirectional sequence edges (" Modelling legislative document collections " introduces a parametrized definition of this graph for greater analytical flexibility). The cross-reference edges are unweighted, while the sequence edges have weights proportional to the distance between their endpoints in the undirected version of the hierarchy graph (e.g., a sequence edge between Section \(i-1\) and Section i in Chapter A weighs more than a sequence edge between Section i in Chapter A and Section \(i+1\) in Chapter B ). The sequence graph expresses how legal practitioners work with a legal text (i.e., they approach a topic through one particular rule, scan its vicinity as long as it is also hierarchically close, possibly follow a cross-reference, then scan the hierarchically close vicinity of a referenced rule). Finally, we define quotient graphs based on attributes attached to the elements of our reference graphs. In these graphs, all elements with the same attribute value(s) (e.g., all seqitems belonging to the same Chapter) are collapsed into one node, and edges are rerouted accordingly.

Dynamic network data model for legislative document collections. All figures created by the authors.

The graphs sketched above allow us to compare legislative document collections both horizontally (i.e., across nations) and vertically (i.e., across time). In particular, hierarchy graphs and reference graphs let us track basic statistics over time (cf. " Assessing legislative growth "), which change when lawmakers add, update, or delete legal rules as depicted in Fig.  1 b. Sequence graphs help us align basic elements of legal texts across years (cf. " Comparing document networks over space and time ”). Along with quotient graphs, they also facilitate the reorganisation of legislative materials via graph clustering (cf. " Comparing document networks over space and time "), where they allow us to focus on different topics or levels of granularity depending on the research question to be investigated. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no comparably flexible explicit model for legislative document collections in the document network analysis literature. Since we do not use all features of the model in our analysis, exploiting the power of our data model to a greater extent is a natural direction for future work (see " Discussion " for details).

Substantial growth in volume, connectivity, and hierarchical structure

The data model introduced in " Dynamic network model of legislation " enables us to track the development of our legislative corpora over time. As Table  1 shows, the absolute size of these corpora has grown substantially in the past two and a half decades, whether measured by the number of tokens (whitespace-delimited chunks of text that roughly correspond to words), the number of structural elements, or the number of cross-references contained therein. Judging merely by the number of tokens, in both jurisdictions, the law in 2018 is more than 1.5 times as large as the law in 1994. Given the fact that the legal systems of both countries were already fully developed twenty-five years ago, the sheer magnitude of this growth is striking.

Inspecting the statistics in Table  1 along with the relative growth over time illustrated in Fig.  2 further reveals two distinct growth patterns: In the United States, the number of tokens and the number of cross-references grow at the same rate, which is considerably lower than the growth rate for the number of structural elements. In contrast, the German corpus exhibits its highest growth rate for the number of cross-references, and growth in the number of tokens is noticeably faster than growth in the number of structural elements. Thus, the volume increase in the federal statutory legislation of the United States is accompanied primarily by an increase in the number of entities, whereas the volume increase in the federal statutory legislation of Germany is accompanied primarily by an increase in the number of relationships in the legislative network. This suggests that cross-references and hierarchical elements function as substitutes when it comes to integrating new content into an existing legal corpus.

Federal legislation in the United States and Germany: growth statistics (1994–2018).

Federal legislation in the United States by Title (1994–2018), measured in tokens.

However, increasing the number of hierarchical elements or the number of cross-references also tends to correlate with a decrease in navigability as it may be indicative of content fragmentation: Anyone trying to understand a legal rule will more often be forced to combine information from multiple places in the law to obtain a complete picture of its content. This difficulty is only exacerbated by the dominant legal information systems, which often force users to click through hierarchies of legal elements and seldom allow them to display a custom selection of structural units in a single browser tab for joint appreciation. Therefore, our statistics for both countries support the intuition that their legislative apparatuses are growing also in complexity—although the complexity increase is driven by different design choices in both jurisdictions. While the difference in legislative drafting styles is of natural interest for comparative legal scholarship, the common growth trend we observe begs a broader question: What is its source?

This question has no meaningful answer within the current formal organisation of the legislative materials. In fact, the US Code as the primary organisational system for legislation in the United States has barely changed in the time period under study. The US Code comprised 50 Titles in 1994; since then, three Titles have been added (51, 52, and 54), two formerly empty Titles have been reassigned (6, 34), and two Titles have experienced small name changes (36, 47). Apart from that, US federal legislation has been codified in the same Titles since 1994, with the total number of Chapters existing across all Titles rising from 2000 to 2723 (for an average growth of 30 Chapters per year). Figure  3 localizes the growth over four-year intervals within the existing, content-based organisation of the US Code. Based on raw token counts (excluding notes and appendices), the biggest growth has occurred in Title 42 (The Public Health and Welfare), Title 7 (Agriculture), and Title 15 (Commerce and Trade). The relative growth in the number of tokens has been highest in Title 4 (Flag and Seal, Seat of Government, and the States), Title 46 (Shipping), and Title 7 (Agriculture).

Federal legislation in the United States and Germany: quotient graphs by Title/Chapter (United States) and Law Name/Book (Germany) (1994 and 2018), with arrows running between nodes indicating that text contained in one node cites text contained in another node. Node sizes indicate token counts (larger = more tokens), where only nodes with at least 5000 tokens (corresponding to roughly ten pages) are shown. For each nation separately, nodes share the same colour if they are placed in the same cluster family, and nodes not in one of the 20 largest cluster families are coloured in grey. Only the labels of the 50 largest nodes (measured in tokens) are drawn.

This gives an interesting first impression on the macro level, but the Title headings are so general, and the content placed in the individual Titles is so diverse (e.g., the current Title 42 contains provisions on Social Security [Chapter 7], Energy Policy [Chapter 134], and Aeronautics and Space Activities [Chapter 155]), that it tells us little about the triggers and the nature of the growth we observe. The situation further deteriorates if we want to compare the German developments with those in the United States: Germany does not codify its federal legislation in a single official collection but publishes only individual acts and classifies them into subject areas for navigation (details can be found in Sect. 1.2 of the  SI ). The number of consolidated acts with more than 500 characters (roughly a paragraph, effectively excluding laws with purely formal content) grew from around 1550 to over 1800 in the period from 1994 to 2005, then was intentionally shrunk to around 1550 until 2011, and has resumed slow growth since 2011, reaching around 1600 in 2018—so we do not even see a monotone growth pattern in this data. To uncover the sources of the growth of the law, and compare our findings between the United States and Germany, we thus need to reorganise the legislative materials of both nations.

Clustering for comparative and dynamic analysis

A first, straightforward way to reorganise the US Code is to aggregate it not at the Title level but rather at the Chapter level. This is especially convenient because the number of Chapters in the US Code is comparable to the number of individual laws in Germany, which we only break up into smaller units if they contain several Books (a common feature of large German codifications such as the German Civil Code [BGB] and the German Commercial Code [HGB]). The node-link diagrams of the quotient graphs corresponding to this reorganisation for the United States and Germany in 1994 and 2018 are shown in Fig.  4 . In these graphs, nodes share the same colour if they belong to the same cluster family . Broadly speaking, cluster families are sets of clusters (a cluster is a set of nodes), mostly from different snapshots, which contain many identical, similar, or related rules (cf. Definition  8 in " Comparing document networks over space and time ")—and as such, they approximate legal topics. We identify cluster families using node and cluster alignments (cf. " Comparing document networks over space and time "). Cluster families will help us assess which legal topics are driving the growth we report in " Substantial growth in volume, connectivity, and hierarchical structure ". The cluster family colouring scheme will be used in all remaining graphics; a full legend mapping colours to legal topics can be found in Sect. 5.1 of the  SI . In Fig.  4 , nodes of the same colour can generally be thought of as belonging together (i.e., same colour \(\Leftrightarrow\) (roughly) same legal topic ), and node colours can be compared across years but not across nations (e.g., the legal topic of red nodes in the graphs for the United States may differ from the legal topic of red nodes in the graphs for Germany).

Federal legislation in the United States by cluster (1994–2018). Each block in each year represents a cluster. Clusters are ordered from left to right by decreasing size (measured in tokens) and coloured by the cluster family to which they belong, where clusters not in one of the 20 largest cluster families are coloured in alternating greys. Small clusters are summarised in one miscellaneous cluster, which is always the rightmost cluster and coloured in light grey. A full legend mapping colours to legal topics can be found in Sect. 5.1 of the  SI .

The node-link diagrams in Fig.  4 allow us to identify interesting connections between individual parts of the law at the Chapter level— e.g., Book Three of the German Commercial Code (HGB/Drittes Buch), which regulates books of accounts, is much more central as a reference target in 2018 than it was in 1994, and the central role of Title 42, Chapter 6 of the US Code in 1994 (The Children’s Bureau) has been taken by Title 42, Chapter 6A (Public Health Service) and Chapter 7 (Social Security) in 2018. But since there are well over 1000 nodes in both jurisdictions, the quotient graphs are difficult to analyse in their entirety, related content remains scattered over different nodes, and the changes between snapshots are difficult to trace. Hence, the main conclusion from Fig.  4 is that the quotient graphs by Title/Chapter (United States) and Law Name/Book (Germany) alone are unsuited to unveil the temporal dynamics of legislative corpora in full detail. To coherently group related content and investigate change over time, we thus need a more sophisticated reorganisation method. Therefore, we cluster our annual Chapter quotient graphs for each country based on their cross-references.

Federal legislation in the United States and Germany: growth statistics by cluster family for selected cluster families (1994–2018). The legends are sorted by the y -values of the regression lines in 2018. The colours are comparable across countries, i.e., same colour \(\Leftrightarrow\) (roughly) same topic .

In (non-overlapping) graph clustering, the goal is to divide the elements of the graph (typically the nodes, here: Chapters in the United States and Books or individual laws in Germany) into groups such that elements in the same group are relatively densely connected, whereas elements in different groups are relatively sparsely connected. We use the Infomap algorithm based on the map equation 33 , 34 to find our clusters for three reasons. First, in using random walks (i.e, sequences of random steps using the edges of the graph) as a basic ingredient, Infomap mimics how lawyers navigate legal texts. The legal navigation process is similar to how scholars navigate papers or web surfers navigate the World Wide Web (WWW), with the additional quirk that sequence edges play a large role in steering the search (think of reading the next paper in the special issue of a journal or clicking through a series of blog posts). Second, by leveraging the connection between finding clusters in a graph and minimizing the description length of a random walk on the graph, Infomap has a solid information-theoretic foundation. And third, the algorithm scales to large graphs.

When running Infomap , we use the default configuration, with one exception: We pass 100 as a parameter for the preferred number of clusters, which roughly corresponds to the number of top-level categories with which legal databases structure their content. This parameter choice allows us to determine the legal topics driving the growth we observe at a sufficiently high granularity while maintaining an overview of the entire corpus, and it protects against sudden jumps in the cluster granularity between years due to small differences in the description lengths of competing solutions, which are more likely to occur when no preferred cluster size is given. As detailed in the sensitivity analysis included in Sect. 4.1 of the  SI , the precise number of input clusters has little impact on the overall results, as long as the numbers of clusters are comparable across years (e.g., tracing changes between a clustering in which most of the text is contained in 5 clusters and a clustering with 50 clusters is an invidious task). To increase the stability of our results, we obtain our final clustering for each country and year as the consensus clustering of 1000 Infomap runs, where the consensus clusters are the connected components of a graph whose nodes are the quotient graph nodes, and whose edges indicate which nodes co-occurred in the same cluster in \(95~\%\) of all runs. As shown in Sect. 4.2 of the  SI , there is little variance both across those runs and across multiple consensus clusterings using 1000 runs to find the consensus, indicating that our results are robust against the randomness inherent in the Infomap algorithm.

Based on our consensus clusterings, we can compute alignments between the clusters we find in subsequent snapshots for each of our countries. These cluster alignments allow us to track the temporal evolution of individual clusters. They are based on node alignments of a fine-grained variant of sequence graphs, which leverage that most rules do not change most of the time—i.e., we can match many seqitems between adjacent snapshots based on their (nearly) identical texts or (nearly) identical keys. For details on our node alignment heuristic and the cluster alignment procedure that builds upon it, see " Comparing document networks over space and time ".

The fine-grained year-to-year cluster alignment facilitates a meso-level analysis of the growth reported in " Substantial growth in volume, connectivity, and hierarchical structure ". Figure  5 provides a comprehensive overview of the aligned clusters for the entire United States corpus (an analogue figure for the German corpus can be found in Sect. 3.3 of the  SI ): The corpus in a certain year is modelled by a horizontal bar, which is composed of blocks representing clusters with width proportional to the number of tokens they contain. The year-to-year movement of tokens between clusters—i.e., the volume of text associated with one cluster in one year and another cluster in the next year, identified using the alignment between the items below the seqitem level ( subseqitems ) of the clusters—is indicated by splines connecting the blocks of adjacent years, where we only plot token movements corresponding to at least \(15~\%\) of the tokens from both the ingoing and the outgoing cluster to filter out noise and isolate largely self-contained strands of the law as cluster families (see also " Comparing document networks over space and time "). The width of the plotted splines is again proportional to the number of tokens moving. Within each horizontal bar, the blocks representing the clusters are sorted in descending order by their size, i.e., the clusters with the largest numbers of tokens are always pushed to the left. To reduce visual clutter, we summarize very small clusters in one miscellaneous cluster. This cluster is always the rightmost cluster, depicted in light grey; more information on its contents can be found in Sect. 5.2 of the  SI . The blocks and splines belonging to the 20 largest cluster families are uniquely coloured, whereas smaller cluster families are alternately coloured in alternating greys. The absolute growth of the United States corpus is reflected in the increasing width of the bars over time, whereas changes in cluster compositions and relative cluster sizes are visible as diagonal year-to-year movements.

Inspecting the numbers behind Fig.  5 , we find that our clusters grow linearly with respect to their size, i.e., bigger clusters gain more tokens than smaller clusters, but that the growth rates differ depending on the legal topic represented by the cluster. To understand which legal topics are driving the overall growth, we determine the growth rate of our cluster families via an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. We select the 20 largest cluster families for both countries, where the size of a cluster family is the size of its largest cluster (measured in tokens), called its leading cluster . For each of these cluster families, we inspect its content composition, and label it with the dominant legal topic. More information on our labelling process, including a list of all labels, can be found in Sect. 5.1 of the  SI . Together, the labelled cluster families account for roughly \(50~\%\) of the total growth in the United States and roughly \(80~\%\) of the total growth in Germany. Figure  6 displays a selection of the most and least growing cluster families in the United States and Germany, while detailed results can be found in Sect. 3.4 of the  SI . The colouring scheme for the United States is identical to that used in Fig.  5 , while the colours for Germany are chosen to match those for the United States for similar topics and avoid colour clashes otherwise.

Notably, in both jurisdictions, growth rates are highest for the cluster families concerning social welfare and financial regulation, and cluster families dealing with taxes, environmental protection, and immigration also display strong growth in both countries. In addition to these similarities, we also find some differences in the growth patterns of both countries. As one might expect, the United States has cluster families concerned with Native Americans (shrinking) and student loans (growing), while no analogous families exist in Germany. Likewise, Germany has a cluster family concerned with war restitution (shrinking) that has no counterpart in the United States. The unmatched growth of the criminal law and corporate and insurance law cluster families in Germany, which may be counterintuitive at first sight, is probably a result of differences in legislative competencies (criminal law and corporate law including insurance are largely state law in the United States while they are federal law in Germany). In addition, insurance regulatory law on the federal level in the United States is primarily enforced through federal regulations, which are not part of our dataset as they are kept in a separate collection (the Code of Federal Regulations). That the United States has a growing cluster family concerned, inter alia, with foreign assistance and export control will not surprise those working in international development or international politics, and the fast-growing cluster dealing with renewable energy, power grid regulation, and related administrative procedures in Germany will not surprise those following the nation’s political discourse (although in both cases, the unexpectedness could be impacted by hindsight bias). Overall, the differences we observe seem to be in line with differences in the prominence of certain policy debates in both countries, reflecting social, political, and cultural divergences. As such, they invite in-depth analysis by subject matter experts.

Finally, the year-to-year cluster alignment underlying Fig.  5 allows us to observe different types of growth. For example, some clusters or cluster families witness intrinsic growth , i.e., growth by addition of tokens without large gains of tokens from other areas; the cluster family containing veteran’s benefits is a case in point, as is a cluster family on small business support and civil and military public procurement. Such cluster families, which have been rather self-contained in the past 25 years, address issues of sustained or increasing societal importance. Other clusters or cluster families, however, witness extrinsic growth , i.e., growth by gaining tokens from clusters in other families. One example is a United States cluster concerned with the environmental protection of national parks and rivers, which grew substantially when rules about national forests as well as prospecting permits and leases joined it from clusters concerned with forestry and mining, indicating a shift in perspective from land use as resource exploitation to land use as resource conservation. To capture such differences in change processes, an elaborate cluster change event taxonomy is needed. Such a taxonomy could build on the work by Palla et al. 4 , and developing it provides an interesting opportunity for further research.

This paper investigates the growth of federal legislation in two industrial countries over a period of 25 years. As such, it is limited in geographic scope (United States and Germany), temporal scope (1994–2018), and institutional scope (legislative bodies on the federal level). This makes it hard to assess to which extent the growth we observe is particular to our data or rather universal . The trend we identify applies to the recent history of federal legislation in at least two countries, the United States and Germany, and our findings in one country provide context for our findings in the other. Thus, we can establish that the growth we find is not a singular phenomenon, but we can only guess how it relates to the trends we might find in the legal document networks of other countries, time frames, or institutions.

The document networks that are most closely related to legislative networks are networks of regulations (produced by executive agencies) and networks of judicial decisions (produced by courts)—and for all of them, growth statistics that are directly comparable to ours are lacking. Some growth statistics are known for patent citation networks 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , where, e.g., the number of patents granted annually by the United States Patent and Trademark Office has roughly tripled in the 25 years from 1994 to 2018 38 . Since the generating processes of patent citation networks are very different from those of legislative networks (patent applicants need to cite prior art in their filings, patent examiners can add further citations, and too much prior art might risk patentability) and the units of analysis are not the same (structural elements in legislative networks vs. individual patents in patent citation networks), however, this result has little bearing on our findings. For similar reasons, comparing our findings with results on non-legal document networks, such as the World Wide Web or scholarly networks, is potentially misleading. To put our findings into perspective, extending the scope of our data to other legal document networks is therefore an important direction for future work. For example, investigations in the following directions are supported by our legal network data model:

Analysing legislative activity on levels above and below the federal level and comparing the results with our findings will advance the search for invariants that characterize the development of legislative systems. It can also help us understand the division of labour within the legislative pyramid (e.g., the federal, the state, and the local level). Does state law grow even faster than federal law? If so, are the growth mechanisms similar or different? How do the answers to these questions depend on the allocation of legislative competencies?

Integrating documents from the executive and judicial branches of government with our datasets could help us explore how different parts of the legal system interact. How does the evolution of a legislative network compare to that of a network of administrative regulations, a network of executive orders, or a network of judicial decisions? In what areas of law is the development driven by the executive or the judiciary, rather than the legislative? What does this tell us about the distribution of power between the different branches of government?

Combining our legislative network data with data collected in other fields of quantitative social science might improve our understanding of the interaction between legal rules and other rule sets that impact the behaviour of individuals and societies. When, where, and how do legislative changes impact how people behave on the ground? When, where, and how do changes in how people behave prompt legislative changes? In other words: What causal relationships can we establish between legal change and societal change? These questions are inherently multidisciplinary, and to separate causes from confounders, legal network data would need to be combined with data reflecting public sentiment (e.g., social media data or public news data) and data reflecting individual or collective choices (e.g., financial network data, company reports, or economic panel data on households, firms, and non-governmental organisations). Similarly, a multi-pronged strategy could be pursued to investigate the relationships between legal change and technological change. Here, combining legal network data with patent citation network, patent litigation, and R&D investment data appears to be particularly promising.

Methodologically, our approach emphasizes the structural features of legislative texts. In particular, for the results we report in this work, the content of the legal texts has been only of indirect interest, e.g., as reflected in raw token counts or in reference structures that characterize legal topics. As demonstrated in " Clustering for comparative and dynamic analysis ", however, qualitative analyses of the legal rules contained in our document networks can yield further insights, and this opens opportunities for normative legal research in areas such as comparative law and legal theory 39 , 40 , 41 . In these legal disciplines, the United States and Germany are usually classified as following different legal traditions, also referred to as legal families , and the categorization, though commonly accepted, has not been corroborated by empirical studies 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 .

Last but not least, the findings reported in this paper are based on a set of choices for methods and parameters. For example, we examine growth by analysing year-to-year net gain of tokens, as this difference can be determined reliably. The amount of legislative activity, however, is likely much higher (e.g., deletions and additions cancel out from the net gain perspective), and developing tools that allow for a fine-grained accounting of legislative changes constitutes an interesting research direction. While we explored our model space extensively (as detailed in Sect. 4 of the  SI ), the parametrisation of the clustering required numerous decisions based on our experience and familiarity with the subject matter. Other parametrisations are possible, and they might be needed in other analytical settings. In particular, future work could examine selected parts of our data in greater detail, zoom in on a particular legal topic, and therefore choose very different parameters to operate at a higher level of resolution.

Modelling legislative document collections

To formalize the intuition that is given in " Dynamic network model of legislation " and illustrated in Fig.  1 , we use the following definitions. Let D be a document understood by the Document Object Model (DOM) standard, with elements \({\mathcal {E}}_D\) of types \(\{\) document , item , seqitem , subseqitem , text \(\}\) and root \(r_D\) of type document . We interpret D as a directed rooted tree \(T_D\) in the graph theoretical sense, where the nodes of \(T_D\) are the elements of D that are not of type text , and an arc between two nodes indicates that the source contains the target—i.e., \(T_D\) contains all structural elements of D with their containment relations. With each node in \(T_D\) , we associate a unique identifier and three attributes: The type of a node is its type in D , the level of a node is its distance d from the root, with \(d(r_D,r_D) = 0\) , and the text of a node is the text of all its children (which can be used to derive additional statistics as necessary). Nodes of type seqitem (short for sequence item ) typically have cite keys , i.e., sequentially ordered unique identifiers by which they are commonly referenced. All nodes may also have headings (representing the headings in the original document), and documents may have abbreviations by which they are commonly referenced. The custom XSD expressing this document model can be found in Sect. 2.4 of the SI .

Now let \({\mathcal {D}}^i_t\) be collection i of documents at time t with their tree representations \({\mathcal {T}}^i_t\) . We define the following graphs for \({\mathcal {D}}^i_t\) :

Definition 1

(Hierarchy Graph \(H^i_t\) ) The hierarchy graph of collection \({\mathcal {D}}^i_t\) , denoted \(H^i_t\) , is a directed graph

with a structural element \({\bar{r}}_i\) on level \(-1\) representing the identity of the collection, and

That is, the hierarchy graph is the union of all document trees’ structural elements equipped with their containment relation, joined by a meta root node identifying the collection.

Definition 2

(Reference Graph \(R^i_t\) ) The reference graph of collection \({\mathcal {D}}^i_t\) , denoted \(R^i_t\) , is a directed multigraph

with \(C^i_{t}\) a multiset given by

That is, the reference graph is the hierarchy graph, augmented by reference relations between its nodes.

Definition 3

(Sequence Graph \(S^i_t(\rho , w, \alpha )\) ) The sequence graph of collection \({\mathcal {D}}^i_t\) with parameters \(\rho\) , w , and \(\alpha\) , denoted \(S^i_t(\rho , w, \alpha )\) , is a directed multigraph

Here, \(V^i_{t,S}(\rho )\) initially contains all nodes of type seqitem , and nodes that are neighbours in the sequence are merged if and only if they meet the merge condition \(\rho\) . \(E^i_{t,S}(\rho , w, \alpha )\) contains the arcs of \(R^i_t\) , projected onto the node set of \(S^i_t\) , with containment relations now represented as a pair of sequence arcs between nodes with adjacent cite keys . The sequence arcs in \(E^i_{t,S}(\rho , w, \alpha )\) are weighted according to a weight function w (specifying the weight decay of sequence arcs as a function of the distance between the source node and the target node in the undirected graph underlying \(H^i_t\) ), and the reference arcs are weighted according to a weight ratio \(\alpha\) (specifying the weight of reference arcs in relation to sequence arcs of maximum weight).

As mentioned in " Dynamic network model of legislation ", the sequence graph representation of a legislative document collection is inspired by how practitioners work with legislative texts. Furthermore, the parameters of the sequence graph allow us to incorporate knowledge about legal users into our model (e.g., by weighting reference arcs less heavily than the highest-weight sequence arcs, we can express the intuition that looking up a reference is less likely than simply reading on). To compute the node alignments mentioned in " Clustering for comparative and dynamic analysis ", we use a more granular variant of the sequence graph:

Definition 4

(Subsequence Graph \({\bar{S}}^i_t(\rho , w, \alpha )\) ] The subsequence graph of collection \({\mathcal {D}}^i_t\) with parameters \(\rho\) , w , and \(\alpha\) , denoted \({\bar{S}}^i_t(\rho , w, \alpha )\) , is defined as the sequence graph \(S^i_t(\rho , w, \alpha )\) , with seqitems being replaced by subseqitems (i.e., structural elements one level below the seqitem level) if they exist.

Finally, we use a multigraph version of the standard graph theoretical notion of a quotient graph (see also " Comparing document networks over space and time "):

Definition 5

(Quotient Graph Q ( G ,  R ) ) Given a graph G and an equivalence relation R on its node set V (i.e., a reflexive, symmetric, and transitive binary relation), a quotient graph is the graph Q ( G ,  R ) with

where \([u]_R := \{~x\in V\mid (u,x)\in R~\}\) and \([v]_R := \{~y\in V\mid (v,y)\in R~\}\) are equivalence classes of V under R .

As shown in " Clustering for comparative and dynamic analysis " for aggregating legal texts at the Chapter level, the equivalence relations of our quotient graphs are generally given by the attributes associated with the structural elements contained in our reference graphs. Another example of quotient graphs, based on the cluster identifiers produced by our graph clustering as node attributes, can be found in Sect. 3.2 of the  SI .

Assessing legislative growth

To assess legislative growth in " Clustering for comparative and dynamic analysis ", we track three statistics for the United States and Germany from 1994 to 2018: the number of tokens, the number of hierarchical structures, and the number of references contained in the federal statutory legislation of both countries. For the token counts, we concatenate the text of all statutory materials for one country and year, ignoring the extensive appendices to some Titles or laws, and split on whitespace characters. The hierarchical structure counts reflect the number of nodes in our hierarchy graphs, and the reference counts reflect the number of edges in our reference graphs. Details on our data preprocessing steps can be found in Sect. 2 of the  SI .

Comparing document networks over space and time

Clustering document networks.

To enable our comparative and dynamic analysis in " Clustering for comparative and dynamic analysis ", we cluster each annual snapshot of the legislative network separately for both countries. As mentioned in " Clustering for comparative and dynamic analysis ", amongst the plethora of graph clustering methods, we choose the Infomap algorithm due to its information-theoretical underpinnings, scalability, and interpretability as a legal (re-)search process. Details on this algorithm can be found in the original papers 33 , 34 .

As the input data to Infomap , we use the sequence graph representation of an annual snapshot with a merge condition \(\rho\) that collapses into one node all rules from the same Chapter (or Title, if the Title has no Chapters) in the United States, and all rules from the same Book (or law, if the law has no Books) in Germany. This consolidation step densifies the adjacency matrix of the sequence graph and reduces the noise in our data. As almost all remaining nodes lie at distance 2 from one another in the hierarchy graph, and very few sequence edges would remain, we base the clustering solely on references. Legislative network analyses using a different \(\rho\) would also require the choice of a weight decay function w and a sequence edge -to- reference edge weight ratio \(\alpha\) . For Infomap itself, we use the default configuration with a preferred cluster number of 100 as an additional input parameter. As discussed in " Clustering for comparative and dynamic analysis ", this parameter choice reflects the level of analytical resolution we seek to operate at, and it approximates the number of high-level topics legal database providers utilise to organise their content. The sensitivity analysis regarding our input parameter can be found in Sect. 4.1 of the  SI .

As Infomap has a stochastic element, we use consensus clustering 46 to increase the robustness of our results as follows: For each snapshot t in each country i , we produce 1000 clusterings with different seeds. From the results of these clusterings, we produce a consensus graph whose nodes are the nodes of the sequence graph, and with an edge connecting two nodes if these nodes are in the same cluster in at least \(950 = 95~\%\) of our Infomap runs. For each year and country, the connected components of the consensus graph then constitute our final clusters, which represent a careful reorganisation of the law enabling comparative and dynamic analysis. This leads to more than 100 final clusters because the initial clusters are typically split into a stable core and several smaller satellites, each of which becomes an additional separate cluster.

Tracing temporal dynamics

To trace legislative change over time, we need to align the textual contents of our yearly snapshots within each jurisdiction. Computing the optimal node alignment between two graphs is generally a hard problem, and methods based on tree edit distance do not scale to legislative trees. However, we can use sequence graphs with the highest possible granularity (using a merge condition \(\rho\) that condenses nothing) along with the text associated with individual nodes, and exploit the fact that most rules do not change most of the time to construct a practical heuristic that greedily computes a partial node alignment \(\phi ^i_t\) across two snapshots \(S^i_t\) and \(S^i_{t+1}\) from corpus i . Our heuristic operates in at most four sequential passes through these snapshots:

First pass: If v is a node in \(S^i_t\) and we find exactly one node w in \(S^i_{t+1}\) with identical text and the text is at least 50 characters long, set \(\phi ^i_t(v) = w\) .

Second pass: If v is an unmatched node in \(S^i_t\) and we find an unmatched node w in \(S^i_{t+1}\) with identical key and identical text, set \(\phi ^i_t(v) = w\) .

Third pass: If v is an unmatched node in \(S^i_t\) and we find exactly one unmatched node w in \(S^i_{t+1}\) such that (i) the text of v contains the text of w (or the text of w contains the text of v ) and (ii) the text remaining unmatched in v ( w ) is shorter than the matched part, set \(\phi ^i_t(v) = w\) .

Fourth pass: If v is an unmatched node in \(S^i_t\) and we find a matched node \(v'\) in \(S^i_t\) in the five-hop neighbourhood of v , search the five-hop neighbourhood of \(\phi ^i_t(v')\) for the unmatched node w (if any) with the largest Jaro-Winkler string similarity 47 to v ; if that similarity is above 0.9, set \(\phi ^i_t(v) = w\) . Repeat recursively with all newly matched nodes until no further matches are found.

With this procedure, we manage to map between \(94~\%\) and \(100~\%\) of the subseqitems between adjacent snapshots in both the United States and Germany, i.e., our partial node alignments are almost complete, and the unmatched subseqitems are indicators of larger changes in the code (rather than errors). Based on partial node alignments \(\phi ^i_t\) for all relevant t , we compute a partial cluster alignment across snapshots, which we call the cluster graph \(C^i\) :

Definition 6

(Cluster Graph \(C^i\) ) Let \(C^i_t\) be the consensus clustering obtained for collection i at time t . The cluster graph of collection i across times T , denoted \(C^i\) , is a weighted digraph

where | v | denotes the number of tokens in a node v of the sequence graph \(S^i_t\) used as input to the clustering at time  t .

That is, the cluster graph \(C^i\) contains the clusters resulting from the clusterings of all snapshots as nodes, and its weighted edges \((c,c',w)\) indicate how many tokens from a cluster \(c'\in C^i_{t+1}\) stem from cluster \(c\in C^i_t\) .

The cluster graph allows us to identify substantial additions, deletions, and movements of tokens in the United States and Germany over our entire period of study, revealing dynamics at the level of individual clusters . To trace dynamics at the level of legal topics , we define cluster families based on the family graphs of our collections:

Definition 7

(Family Graph \(F^i(\gamma )\) ) Let \(C^i\) be the cluster graph of collection i across times T . The family graph of collection i across times T , denoted \(F^i\) , is a weighted digraph

where | c | denotes the number of tokens in cluster c .

In words, the family graph \(F^i(\gamma )\) contains the same nodes as the cluster graph \(C^i\) but only those edges from \((c,c',w)~\in ~E^i_C\) that account for at least a \(\gamma\) fraction of the tokens in both c and \(c'\) . We set \(\gamma = 0.15\) to filter out noise and isolate parts of the cluster graph that are largely self-contained, but this threshold can be replaced by any other number between 0 and 1 for other analyses.

To trace the evolution of legal topics over time, based on the family graph, we define:

Definition 8

(Cluster Family \(V^i_{F,j}\) ) Let \(F^i(\gamma )\) be the family graph for collection i across times T consisting of cluster families as connected components. A cluster family \(V^i_{F,j}\) is the node set of \(F^i(\gamma )\) ’s j th largest connected component (measured in tokens).

In addition to the overall size of a cluster family (given by the size of its leading cluster), our analysis also uses a temporal notion of cluster family size:

Definition 9

(Cluster Family Size at Time t \(|V^i_{F,j,t}|\) ) Let \(V^i_{F,j}\) be a cluster family j in collection i , and let \(C^i_t\) be the consensus clustering obtained for time t . The size of cluster family j at time t is defined as

where | c | denotes the number of tokens in a node c .

With our parametrisation, cluster families are sets of Chapters, Books, or laws that are closely related by cross-references or (almost) textual identity over time. As such, they approximately correspond to legal topics . Further information on how we label these topics can be found in Sect. 5.1 of the  SI .

Data availability

For the United States, the raw input data used in this study is publicly available from the Annual Historical Archives published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives, and is also available from the authors upon reasonable request. For Germany, the raw input data used in this study was obtained from juris GmbH but restrictions apply to the availability of this data, which was used under license for the current study, and so is not publicly available. For details, see Sect. 1.2 of the SI . The preprocessed data used in this study (for both the United States and Germany) is archived under the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4070767 .

Code availability

The code used in this study is available on GitHub in the following repositories: Paper— https://github.com/QuantLaw/Complex-Societies-and-Growth ; DOI of publication release: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4070769 . Data preprocessing— https://github.com/QuantLaw/legal-data-preprocessing ; DOI of publication release: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4070773 . Clustering— https://github.com/QuantLaw/legal-data-clustering ; DOI of publication release: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4070775 .

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by a grant from the Interdisciplinary Legal Research Program (ILRP) at Bucerius Law School and benefited from discussions with its director Hans-Bernd Schäfer.

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The Harvard Library catalog, HOLLIS, includes records for the millions of books and other items in all of the Harvard libraries' collections, including the law library.  It also includes index entries for periodical articles.

The Subject fields of many HOLLIS records include controlled, predefined vocabulary terms from a subject outline established by the Library of Congress, the  Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) ( http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects.html ) .  Although there are also other lists of subject terms that catalogers also use, the LCSH subject keywords predominate in HOLLIS catalog records, especially in records for newer materials.

This guide includes links to pre-populated HOLLIS searches by subject, using LCSH and other predefined subject terms. There are also links to some general keyword searches, using terms of art that appear in the literature related to this topic. 

A link to a pre-populated search in this guide appears as follows:

HOLLIS Search: Subject =  "Law -- Social Aspects"

The HOLLIS searches listed below are intentionally broad. To reconfigure and/or limit the displayed search results after clicking a link to a pre-populated search, you can do any or all of the following:

• Add additional keywords and re-run the search.
• Change the search parameters from "Everything" to "Library Catalog."  This will limit your search results to items that have been cataloged by the Harvard Libraries, and will exclude periodical articles.
• Change results display order by using the "Sort by" menu on the right -- for example, change the sort from Relevance to Date-Newest to view the newest items first.
• Use the limiting options on the right side of the screen: resource type, date range, location, subject, language, and more.
• HOLLIS search: Keywords Anywhere = "Constitutional Subject"
• HOLLIS Search: Keywords Anywhere = "Legal Geography"
• HOLLIS Search: Keywords Anywhere = "Public-Private Distinction"
• HOLLIS search: Keywords Anywhere = "Sociolegal Studies"
• HOLLIS search: Publisher = "Eleven" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Society"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Agency and Structure" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Canon Law -- Social Aspects"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Citizenship -- Social Aspects"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Civil Society"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Communitarianism" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Community Life" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Conduct of Life" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Constitutional Law -- Social Aspects"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Culture and Law"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Deliberative Democracy"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Dignity" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Distributive Justice"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Durkheim" AND "Emile" AND "Law"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Dworkin" AND "Ronald" AND "Law"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Ethnological Jurisprudence"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Ethnology" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Family Policy" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Foucault" AND "Michel" AND "Law"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Freedom of Religion"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Habermas" AND "Jurgen" AND "Law"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Historiography" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Human Services" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Judicial Behavior"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Jurisprudence" AND Keyword Anywhere = "Society"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Law -- Social Aspects"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Law -- Sociological Aspects"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Law and Anthropology"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Law and the Humanities"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Law and the Social Sciences"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Legal Polycentricity"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Liberty"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Macrosociology" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Marginality, Social" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Marx" AND "Karl" AND "Law"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Mass Society" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Political Participation"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Popular Culture" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Power (Social Sciences)" AND Keywords Anywhere = "law OR legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Respect for Persons -- Law and Legislation"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Rule of Law -- Social Aspects"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Social Change" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Social Control" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Social Justice"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Social Movements" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Social Participation" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Social Policy" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Social Protection" AND Keyword Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Social Rights" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Social Structure" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Sociological Jurisprudence"
• HOLLIS Search: Subject = "Weber" AND "Max" AND "Law"
• HOLLIS search: Subject = "Welfare State" AND Keywords Anywhere = "Law OR Legal"
• Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and its Relation to Modern Ideas by Henry Sumner Maine Publication Date: 1864 (1986 reprint)
• Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction by Mark Goodale Publication Date: 2017
• The Concept of Law by H.L.A. Hart Publication Date: 1961
• Explaining Law: Macrosociological Theory and Empirical Evidence by Larry D. Barnett Publication Date: 2015
• Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law by Eugene Ehrlich Publication Date: 1936, this translation published in 2002
• Human Dignity and Law: Legal and Philosophical Investigations by Stephen Riley Publication Date: 2018
• Law, Culture, and Society: Legal Ideas in the Mirror of Social Theory by Roger Cotterrell Publication Date: 2006
• Law, Justice, and Society: A Sociolegal Introduction by Anthony Walsh Publication Date: 2014 (3rd ed.)
• Law and Anthropology by Wolfgang Fikentscher Publication Date: 2016 (2nd ed)
• Law and Society: An Introduction by Steven Barkan Publication Date: 2018 (2nd ed.)
• Law as Culture: An Invitation by Lawrence Rosen Publication Date: 2006
• Law in a Changing Society by Wolfgang Friedmann Publication Date: 1959 Available through Hein as an eBook.
• Law in Many Societies: A Reader by Lawrence M. Friedman, Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, and Manuel A. Gómez (eds.) Publication Date: 2011
• Law in Modern Society: Toward a Criticism of Social Theory by Roberto Unger Publication Date: 1976
• The Politics of Juridification by Mariano Croce Publication Date: 2018
• The Rule of Law in the Real World by Paul Gowder Publication Date: 2016
• Sociological Jurisprudence: Juristic Thought and Social Inquiry by Roger Cotterrell Publication Date: 2018
• The Sociological Movement in Law by Alan Hunt Publication Date: 1978
• Sociology of Law: Visions of a Scholarly Tradition by Mathieu Deflem Publication Date: 2008
• After Identity: A Reader in Law and Culture by Dan Danielsen and Karen Engle (eds.) Publication Date: 1995
• Exploring the "Socio" of Socio-Legal Studies by Dermot Feenan (ed.) Publication Date: 2013
• Law & Society: Readings on the Social Study of Law by Stewart Macaulay, Lawrence M. Friedman, John Stookey (eds.) Publication Date: 1995
• The Law & Society Reader by Richard L. Abel (ed.) Publication Date: 1995
• Law, Legal Culture, and Society: Mirrored Identities of the Legal Order by Alberto Febbrajo (ed.) Publication Date: 2019
• Law and Social Theory by Reza Banakar and Max Trevers (eds.) Publication Date: 2013 (2nd ed)
• The Law and Society Reader II by Erik W. Larson and Patrick D. Schmidt (eds.) Publication Date: 2014
• Law in Action: A Socio-Legal Reader by Stewart Macaulay, Lawrence M. Friedman, Elizabeth Mertz (eds.) Publication Date: 2007
• Private Life and Public Order: The Context of Modern Public Policy by Theodore J. Lowi (ed.) Publication Date: 1968
• The Role of Social Science in Law by Elizabeth Mertz (ed.) Publication Date: 2008
• Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions by Denis J. Galligan and Mila Versteeg (eds.) Publication Date: 2013
• Sociological Constitutionalism by Paul Blokker, Chris Thornhill (eds.) Publication Date: 2017
• The Sociology of Law: Interdisciplinary Readings by Rita James Simon (ed.) Publication Date: 1968
• Sociology of Law: Selected Readings by Vilhelm Aubert (ed.) Publication Date: 1969
• Analyzing Law's Reach: Empirical Research on Law and Society by American Bar Association Publication Date: 2008
• Law and Society: Critical Concepts in Law by David Cowan, Linda Mulcahy and Sally Wheeler (eds.) Publication Date: 2014 Four-volume set published by Oxford University Press.
• The Sociology of Law: An Expanded Bibliography of Theoretical Literature by A. Javier Trevino Publication Date: 2007 (4th ed)
• Theory and Method in Socio-Legal Research by Reza Banakar and Max Travers (eds.) Publication Date: 2005
• The American Moment Johns Hopkins University Press
• Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought University of Michigan Press
• Applied Legal Philosophy Dartmouth
• Bibliothèque de droit social Librarie général de droit et de jurisprudence
• Borzoi Books in Law and American Society Knopf / Random House
• Cambridge Studies in Law and Society Cambridge University Press
• Clarendon Law Series Oxford University Press
• Contemporary Law Series Yale University Press
• Current Legal Issues Oxford University Press
• Discourses of Law Routledge
• Fundamental Issues in Law and Society Research Northwestern University Press and the American Bar Association
• The International Library of Essays in Law and Legal Theory New York University Press
• The International Library of Essays in Law and Society Ashgate Publishing
• Juris Diversitas Ashgate Publishing / Routledge
• Landmark Law Cases & American Society University Press of Kansas
• Law, Meaning, and Violence University of Michigan Press
• Law and Social Theory Pluto Press
• Law and Society Series Publishers that have series with this title include Transaction Publishers and the University of British Columbia Press.
• Law in Society Robertson (UK), Wiley (US)
• Legal Discourse and Communication Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Legal Issues of Services of General Interest T.M.C. Asser Press
• Legal Latin in Practice New York University Press
• Morality and Society University of Chicago Press
• Nomos New York University Press
• Oxford Socio-Legal Studies Oxford University Press
• Oñati International Series in Law and Society Hart Publishing
• Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies Palgrave Macmillan
• Penser le Droit Bruylant
• Routledge Research in Applied Ethics Routledge
• Routledge Studies in Governance and Public Policy Routledge
• Routledge Studies in Law, Society, and Popular Culture Routledge
• Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought Routledge
• Social Justice Routledge - note that this publisher has two series with "Social Justice" in the title, and the search returns both.
• Studies in the Sociology of Law Routledge
• Studies on Law and Social Control Academic Press
• Utrecht Centre for Accountability and Liability Law (UCALL) Boom Juridische / Eleven
• Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference Yale University Press
• Annual Review of Law and Social Science
• Behavioral Science and Policy
• Crime, Law and Social Change
• Duke Forum for Law and Social Change
• Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy
• Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge
• International Journal of Law in Context
• International Journal of Society and Law Note: In 2007, the name of this journal was changed to "International Journal of Law, Crime, and Justice."
• International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy
• Journal of Law and Courts Publication of the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association.
• Journal of Law and Social Change
• Journal of Law and Society
• The Journal of Law in Society
• The Journal of Legal Studies
• Journal of Social Policy
• Law & Social Inquiry
• Law & Society Review
• Law, Culture and the Humanities
• Law and Human Behavior
• Law and Humanities
• Law in American Society
• The Legal Studies Forum
• Modern Law Review
• Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy
• Oxford Journal of Legal Studies
• Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR)
• Review of Law and Social Changee
• Social Policy and Society
• Social Politics
• Social Problems
• Studies in Law, Politics, and Society
• Virginia Journal of Social Policy & Law
• Last Updated: Jul 13, 2023 3:49 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/law-and-society

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15 Law and Society

Lynn Mather is Professor of Law and Political Science and Director of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

• Published: 05 September 2013
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The study of law and society rests on the belief that legal rules and decisions must be understood in context. Law is not autonomous, standing outside of the social world, but is deeply embedded within society. While political scientists recognize the fundamentally political nature of law, the law and society perspective takes this assumption several steps further by pointing to ways in which law is socially and historically constructed, how law both reflects and impacts culture, and how inequalities are reinforced through differential access to, and competence with, legal procedures and institutions. This article discusses the key characteristics of a law and society perspective, some of the major research contributions of this field, and recent developments in law and society that hold particular promise for scholars of law and politics today. In particular, it examines three broad areas of law and society scholarship: disputing, decision making, and legal ideology and consciousness.

The study of law and society rests on the belief that legal rules and decisions must be understood in context. Law is not autonomous, standing outside of the social world, but is deeply embedded within society. While political scientists recognize the fundamentally political nature of law, the law and society perspective takes this assumption several steps further by pointing to ways in which law is socially and historically constructed, how law both reflects and impacts culture, and how inequalities are reinforced through differential access to, and competence with, legal procedures and institutions.

The interdisciplinary field of law and society dates to the late 1950s/mid-1960s, and the story of its early development has been told before (e.g. Levine 1990 ; Schlegel 1995 ; Garth and Sterling 1998 ). Its philosophical roots lie in the jurisprudential writings of the legal realists, who saw law as a vehicle for social engineering and challenged depictions of law as apolitical and autonomous. Likewise, social scientists were highly optimistic and confident about the potential of their work to solve social problems. Law and society scholars of the 1960s were also responding to many of the burning issues (literally—from riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and elsewhere) of the day. Dismayed and frustrated by the formalism of the legal academy and the irrelevance and narrowness of much social science, a number of legal scholars and social scientists sought to engage in research that would address current policy debates over racial discrimination, poverty, and crime. Substantial funding for empirical research on these topics from the Ford Foundation, Russell Sage, and others provided further impetus for studies that would combine social science and law. Responding to the availability of research funds and their own political and intellectual agendas, a multidisciplinary group of scholars created the Law and Society Association in 1964. Its members were drawn primarily from sociology, political science, and law, with some representation from anthropology, psychology, history, and occasionally economics.

The law and society field welcomed a wide range of subject areas for study. At the same time, President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty attempted to underscore the rule of law by creating federally funded legal aid programs to increase access to justice and address problems of the urban poor. Politicians and scholars recognized that what happened in local agencies or in trial courts could be as important as what happened in Washington, DC. This opened up new topics for empirical research on legal processes and resulted in law and society studies of public defender offices, legal aid, lower courts, administrative agencies, juries, police, and prosecutors. Political scientists authored many of these works and they enjoyed the feedback from sociologists and law professors they received in the law and society community. Constitutional law scholars who supported law and society in its early days had also turned their attention away from formal doctrinal analysis of Supreme Court decisions. They focused instead on interest groups and the lower courts in an effort to understand the political and organizational dynamics in test case litigation, the difficulties of implementing the decisions of the Supreme Court, the politics of administrative agencies, and the politics of judicial selection.

With this early history in mind, what are the key characteristics of a law and society perspective? What are some of the major research contributions of this field? And what recent developments in law and society hold particular promise for scholars of law and politics today?

1 Key Characteristics

Law and society scholarship has typically been multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary . Although most law and society scholars have been trained in one or another established discipline, they have frequently borrowed from other disciplines in their research. For example, early empirical analyses of plea bargaining in criminal courts reflected multiple methods and theories. The studies drew upon organization theory ( Blumberg 1967 ; Eisenstein and Jacob 1977 ; Feeley 1979 ), social learning theory ( Heumann 1978 ), ethnography ( Mather 1979 ), ethnomethodology ( Sudnow 1965 ), history ( Alschuler 1979 ; Friedman 1979 ), and discourse analysis ( Maynard 1984 ). As general law and society theories emerged, for example, to explain trial courts ( Shapiro 1981 ; Boyum and Mather 1983 ), legal mobilization ( McCann 1994 ), or “why the ‘haves’ come out ahead” ( Galanter 1974 ), these theories sought to integrate the perspectives of different disciplines. Such interdisciplinary work has been more common in recent years. It reflects the maturity and growth of the field as well as the development of graduate and undergraduate programs in law and society.

Second, in terms of epistemology and methodology , law and society emerged during the 1960s, a time of the behavioral revolution in the social sciences and an optimistic embrace of positivism. Scholars focused their work on legal processes and individual and group decision-making. The study of rules was passé, as was the study of formal institutions. Empirical studies of behavior could be qualitative or quantitative, with the former defined broadly to encompass historical or anthropological methods. Methodological debates that were fierce in political science at this time were, by contrast, relatively muted within law and society. This tendency has continued to characterize the field, with greater focus on theory and substantive results than on sophistication of the methods or an insistence on the superiority of any particular method ( Engel 1999 ).

By the 1980s, law and society critics of positivism raised serious challenges to the paradigm and articulated postrealist, interpretive, and constitutive approaches to law ( Brigham and Harrington 1989 ; Harrington and Yngvesson 1990 ; Hunt 1993 ). Scholars reclaimed an interest in institutions ( Smith 1988 ; Heydebrand and Seron 1990 ) as well as embracing an interest in legal ideology and legal discourse ( Mather and Yngvesson 1980–1 ; Conley and O’Barr 1990 ; Merry 1990 ). Contemporary law and society scholarship encompasses a wide range of epistemological perspectives, from the cultural studies approach of law and humanities to empirical legal studies—and everything in between.

Third, normative, policy-relevant concerns for justice and equality that initially drove the field remain significant even as debate continues over the best way that scholars can realize that normative commitment. Sarat and Silbey (1988) urged law and society colleagues to reject the “pull of the policy audience” in order to produce broader, more critical scholarship and to avoid reinforcing the status quo. Levine (1990) noted the long history of tension between basic and applied research in sociolegal studies, but suggested that both could be realized; theoretical work can provide policy insights and studies of specific policy reforms can generate theory. In an important exchange over postmodernism and political change, Handler (1992) chastised the new postmodern scholarship for its inattention to power structures, collective identity, and the possibilities of transformative politics (but see responses by Calavita and Seron 1992 ; McCann 1992 ). A decade later, Munger (2001) called for renewed activism along with scholarly inquiry. He observed that as the law and society “field goes global, I see a reawakening of the earlier interest in justice and equality, and in power, class, race, ethnicity, and religion” (2001, 8).

Fourth, comparative approaches to research questions in law and society have been a long-standing commitment of the field, even as they have sometimes been honored in the breach more than the practice ( Mather 2003 ). The very first volume of the Law and Society Review contained articles on comparative family law, one by a sociologist ( Cicourel 1967 ) and the other by anthropologists ( Bohannan and Huckleberry 1967 ). Other important sociolegal studies examined comparative disputing processes ( Abel 1974 ; Moore 1978 ; Nader and Todd 1978 ), comparative lawyers ( Abel and Lewis 1988 ; Epp 1998 ), comparative courts ( Shapiro 1981 ; Jacob et al. 1996 ), comparative regulation ( Hawkins 1992 ; Gunningham and Rees 1997 ; Kagan 2001 ), and comparative lay participation in legal decisions ( Hans 2003 ).

One quarter of the membership of the Law and Society Association (LSA) is non-American, and the LSA leadership has been committed to holding its annual meetings in outside of the U.S. on a regular basis. Meetings in Amsterdam (1991), Glasgow (1996), Budapest (2001), and Berlin (2007) were held jointly with the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law (the last meeting was also supported by three other non-U.S. associations). LSA meetings held in Vancouver (2002) and Montreal (2008) are cosponsored by the Canadian Law and Society Association. Political scientists in the United States regularly suggest that the field of “American politics” should really be a subset of “comparative politics,” but old habits die hard. The American politics subfield operates quite independently and scholars infrequently cite across subfields. By contrast, the law and society field actively seeks connections to the empirical scholarship on law being done in other countries, connections that are facilitated by LSA networks.

Finally, while law is the central concern of law and society scholars, it is not seen as residing in a formal, separate sphere, apart from society. Law is in society , and most now agree with the argument Laura Nader made initially that the field should have been named “Law in Society” rather than law and society ( Nader 1969 ). Just as political scientists have long recognized the political nature of law, sociolegal scholars add that law is also social, cultural, economic, linguistic, and ideological. Researchers engaged in empirical and theoretical work on law in society thus confront the extraordinarily messy (and some would say futile) question of how to say anything interesting or disciplined at all if in fact “the law is all over” ( Sarat 1990 ). Scholars in the field do not agree in their response. But most identify a particular question or problem about the creation, maintenance, or change in law and seek to answer it wherever the question leads. What is important is to be self-aware in drawing the boundaries for study, as opposed to limiting a priori the scope, and to draw on other disciplines for relevant concepts, methods, or insights.

It is difficult to strictly define “the” law and society perspective for a political science audience. Some of what falls under this umbrella (e.g. courts and public policy, law and social change, regulation, judicial decision-making) is mainstream law and politics. Other law and society work may seem less so because of the individual topics studied (border patrol, divorce lawyers, film, science laboratories, lawyer jokes) or the methods used (narrative, experiments, network analysis, ethnography). Over the years law and society scholars have attempted to define the field through textbooks or edited collections; these underscore the editors’ quite different perspectives on the field ( Kidder 1983 ; Lempert and Sanders 1986 ; Macaulay, Friedman, and Stookey 1995 ; Sarat 2004 ).

2 Major Contributions to Law and Society Scholarship

A recent symposium of the Law and Courts Newsletter (Winter 2007) featured summaries of the law and society field and its relation to political science, written by seven political scientists who have long been active in this area. Readers should consult this issue for excellent descriptions of this large and robust field of study. I will concentrate on three broad areas of law and society scholarship: disputing; decision-making; and legal ideology and consciousness. I will then briefly mention other areas, while acknowledging that I am still omitting many others.

2.1 Disputing

Studies of disputing ask how disputes become court cases and what occurs to cases once they are in court. What are the alternatives to courts for resolving problems or disputes? Why do some conflicts become legal cases but most do not? How does understanding disputing help to explain conflict resolution and the impact of law? Both criminal and civil conflicts in the U.S. fill out a pyramid with vast numbers of grievances or injuries at the bottom, a smaller number that become disputes, even fewer that contain some kind of informal recourse to law (calling the police or a lawyer), an even smaller number with two-party legal activity (plea bargaining or negotiated settlement), and only a tiny fraction resolved by trial ( Trubek 1980–1 ; Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat 1980–1 ). A large survey done in the late 1970s by the Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP) showed that different types of civil grievances (e.g. post-divorce) were likelier than others (e.g. discrimination) to reach higher on the pyramid of legal action ( Miller and Sarat 1980–1 ; Kritzer 1991 ). The empirical results of the CLRP scholars have been reported in myriad judicial process textbooks but this important, forty-year-old study has not been replicated.

Galanter’s (1974) comprehensive theory exploring the use of courts by repeat players vs. one-shotters suggested multiple ways in which those experienced in legal procedures are advantaged in the legal process. Galanter also showed how disparities in the legal profession (specialization, relations with clients, legal training, etc.) further exacerbated the advantages of the repeat players. Galanter’s study in the Law and Society Review is one of the most frequently cited law review articles of all time. A number of empirical studies since then have supported his theory (see Kritzer and Silbey 2003 ).

One aspect of Galanter’s theory centers on the differential use of formal vs. informal mechanisms for dispute settlement by repeat players and one-shotters. That is, parties who are more familiar with legal processes know when to settle out of court and when to press on to formal trial, according to the likelihood of gain in the legal rule as opposed to a win or loss in the immediate conflict. This argument, powerfully supported by Albiston’s (1999) research on litigation outcomes after the Family and Medical Leave Act, shows an important link between disputing and change in the law. Employers who were sued by employees seeking family leave ultimately “won” even when they “lost” by settling some cases out of court because employers gained important rule-making opportunities in other cases that ultimately weakened the legislation.

Another way in which disputing can be linked to change in law is through the expansion or reframing of a dispute into a new normative framework, and through the support for that expansion that parties may obtain. As Mather and Yngvesson (1980–1) suggest, legal cases are not objective events, but are socially constructed to reflect the interests of supporters of disputants, to appeal to a particular audience, and to incorporate the values and language of law. The language of law is inherently political, ordering facts and invoking norms to support one set of interests or another. By constructing claims in certain ways, one can expand the law and mobilize others in support of the new interpretation. Groups lacking in political power may succeed in attracting support for legal change through reframing issues and mobilizing support, as shown in litigation over comparable worth ( McCann 1994 ), tobacco control ( Mather 1998 ), and sexual harassment ( Marshall 2005 ). A victory in litigation, even if later reversed on appeal, can aid in agenda setting and serve as a catalyst for further change.

The linkage among litigation, political order, and political change also emerges in empirical research on the use of courts over time. Filing disputes in court should be seen as an alternative to traditional forms of political participation, as Zemans (1983) argued, and indeed longitudinal study of court usage in the U.S. by McIntosh (1983) supports this view. Nevertheless, courts are not passive institutions waiting for disputes to percolate up the pyramid to become fodder for judicial decisions. Courts are institutions of the state and as such, they (or other arms of government) can and do exercise power to shape the nature and amount of litigation ( Munger 1990 ; Harrington and Ward 1995 ). This general point about the power of institutions was made in law and society research some time ago. Recent battles over tort reform illustrate it well, as actions by state legislatures, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court have all sought to curb what business interests saw as an “explosion” of litigation.

2.2 Decision-making

A second major area of law and society research focuses on decision-making . Scholarship on judicial decision-making is hardly news to those interested in the politics of law, but those in law and society broadened the terrain in several ways. They examined decision-making by judges at all levels of court including nonlawyer judges on justice of the peace courts, those on small claims courts, misdemeanor and felony courts, civil courts, and occasionally appellate courts. Research revealed differences in sentencing severity across courts and in patterns of judicial interaction with prosecutors ( Eisenstein and Jacob 1977 ; Eisenstein, Flemming, and Nardulli 1988 ). Questions about racial discrimination in trial court sentencing have been investigated numerous times, initially with some mixed results. More recently, an overview of forty different sentencing studies that controlled for offense and defendant’s prior record showed clear evidence of significant race effects in judicial decisions in state and federal courts ( Spohn 2000 ).

The impact of race has also been shown in numerous state studies of jury and prosecutorial decisions to recommend the death penalty. Jury decision-making has received a great deal of attention from sociolegal scholars. They have explored, for example, the impact of decision rules and jury size on verdicts, differences in evidence-driven vs. verdict-driven processes of deliberation, how juries compare to judges, juror assessments of credibility by race and gender of witnesses, jury assessments of corporate defendants, jury awards over time, and jury nullification ( Levine 1992 ; Hans 2000 ; 2006 ; Sunstein et al. 2002 ).

Second, recognizing that over 95 percent of trial court cases settle through plea negotiations or settlement talks, without trial, sociolegal researchers examined decision-making by lawyers. They asked, for example, how, why, and when do prosecutors and defense attorneys engage in plea bargaining? Do decisions by defense attorneys vary according to whether they are privately employed or public defenders? How are lawyers’ decisions to recommend particular dispositions affected by the views of their clients? The rich literature on these questions found in earlier research on plea bargaining would benefit from reexamination in order to see how legal changes on sentencing and jury selection, demographic changes in lower court personnel, increased punitiveness in the cultural and political climate, and the impact of federal anti-immigration measures on local officials, have affected the processes of negotiation in criminal courts.

Lawyers in civil cases also play important roles in dispute settlement and in the production of law. Research on lawyers representing personal injury plaintiffs ( Rosenthal 1974 ; Genn 1987 ; Kritzer 2004 ) and divorce clients ( Sarat and Felstiner 1995 ; Mather, McEwen, and Maiman 2001 ) has revealed much about lawyers’ screening decisions in agreeing to represent clients, their interactions with clients, and their negotiating strategies and decisions on settlements. We also know a good deal about the strategies, problems, and goals of cause lawyers ( Sarat and Scheingold 1998 ; Scheingold and Sarat 2004 ). By contrast, we know much less about decision-making in the work of corporate lawyers, and this is also an area that deserves more research.

Research that began by simply analyzing individual decision-making soon moved to consider (and to incorporate into theory building) the context in which those decisions were made. Relevant aspects of context include, for example, institutional features, legal rules, economic structures, social networks and organization, and shared cultural values. The literature thus moved from its original behavioral focus to reflect institutional and cultural theories. Understanding and explaining the work of lawyers involves studying them within their communities of practice, including the law firm as a community or important cultural space ( Kelly 1994 ; Mather, McEwen, and Maiman 2001 ). Empirical research that has demonstrated collegial influence on lawyers’ decisions has been done in the areas of divorce, personal injury, criminal defense, and most recently, occupational safety and health ( Schmidt 2005 ).

Heinz and Laumann (1982) first reported the significant differences in lawyers according to what they called the two hemispheres of the legal profession: lawyers who represent organizations or corporate entities and those who represent individual clients (and see Heinz et al. 2005 for more recent findings). Lawyers representing organizations not only have higher incomes and prestige than those representing individuals, but they work in larger firms, have fewer clients, spend less time in court, and have different educational backgrounds, social characteristics, and political values. The bifurcated profession has enormous implications for the creation and enforcement of law. For example, law and politics scholars should examine how lawyers exercise influence on law through particular communities of legal practice (Mather forthcoming). Specialization by legal field, coupled with the social stratification of the profession (with disproportionate representation in different fields by gender, race, class, and religion) and observed differences in political values by field, provide rich data for political scientists who are willing to go to lawyers’ offices, rather than to courts, to see where law is made.

Finally, sociolegal scholars broadened their scope beyond judges, juries, and lawyers to include the work of less visible legal actors such as court clerks ( Yngvesson 1993 ), health and safety inspection officers ( Hawkins 2002 ), immigration officials ( Coutin 2000 ), probation officers, and police ( Skolnick 1994 ; Bell 2002 ). Every decision of a low-level legal official helps to shape a pattern of law interpretation and enforcement, and to construct ideas about law for the public they encounter.

Even further, law and society researchers have explored the decisions and work of private actors, those without official legal status but who also contribute to lawmaking and law enforcement through private ordering. Who are some of these actors? They include: real estate agents and mortgage brokers who maintain a color line in urban housing; security guards with badges and uniforms who patrol malls and parking lots; human resource officers who define the parameters of civil rights laws through their routine advice and actions in employee disputes; mediators who help parties resolve conflicts without the expense of trial or the constraints of law. Political scientists studying the legislative process are accustomed to paying close attention to the role of private interest groups in lawmaking and administrative enforcement and have developed theories of specialized influence (e.g. the “iron triangle” for congressional subcommittees). Similarly, law and courts scholars should build on the empirical work on private ordering to better understand connections between powerful private interests and law (see e.g. Edelman and Suchman 1999 ).

2.3 Legal Ideology and Consciousness

Legal ideology and consciousness comprises a third major area of law and society scholarship. Decisions by the street-level bureaucrats, legal officials, and private actors discussed above matter in part because of the direct effect of their actions on people’s lives: denying a mortgage; stopping and frisking a suspicious character; channeling personnel conflicts away from law. But from an ideological perspective, what is even more important for the law is the meaning conveyed by those decisions. What values reside in the categories of “suspicious” and “not suspicious” and how are they conveyed in each encounter? Law and society research reminds us that law is constructed through such categories for classification. When the clerk of a local court dismisses a citizen’s grievance as not “really” a legal matter, he is making law for the court ( Yngvesson 1993 ). Similarly, with every passage through airport security, government agents are communicating that the law of the U.S. border is different than it was before September 11; the state is more powerful, scrutinizing not only our passports and suitcases, but our belt buckles, toothpaste, and nail files.

Studies of the actuarial practices of insurance companies, for example, underline the power that comes from the rhetoric of granting or denying insurance ( Simon 1988 ; Glenn 2000 ). Researchers have examined different areas of law to uncover the hidden assumptions, as in the racial bias of insurance, that privilege some people and interests over others. Numerous works document race and gender disparities that emerge from ostensibly neutral concepts or principles. As the title of one article says, “Is the ‘reasonable person’ a reasonable standard in a multicultural world?” ( Minow and Rakoff 1998 ). Focus on legal ideology looks at the categories of law and how they are used, in order to reveal the process by which legal meaning is constructed. While political scientists readily acknowledge the ideology of constitutional constructs, law and society scholars analyze the narratives, taken for granted assumptions, and values in other areas of law—contracts and tort ( Engel 1984 ), employment, property, family, and so forth.

If knowledge is power, then how do people obtain their knowledge of law? Examining the “litigation crisis” in tort law and the media coverage of the hot coffee and antitobacco lawsuits, Haltom and McCann (2004) found that the institutional conventions of news reporting combined with cultural values about the importance of personal responsibility to muffle the voices of litigation scholars and the plaintiffs’ bar. Interest groups on different legal issues battle for the hearts and minds of jurors and the public. While the tort reformers played their hand in the mass media, the plaintiffs’ bar chose an insider strategy of legislative and judicial lobbying. In addition to the newspapers’ images of legal issues or cases, television and film provide ample material for the cultural production of law. The drama of trials, conflict between good and evil, guilt and innocence, chaos and order, all convey legal meaning that may find its way into law. Survey research on the “ CSI effect,” for example, has not revealed clear results, yet some trial attorneys are convinced that the TV show is shaping popular legal ideas. Prosecutors worry that avid watchers of CSI , when asked to serve on a jury, are more reluctant to convict unless there is scientific evidence.

Studies of legal consciousness explore how people’s experiences and understandings of law translate into actions and how social action in turn constitutes their relation to law. For example, Ewick and Silbey (1998) conducted detailed interviews with people of diverse backgrounds and found three distinct narratives about law, each with its own normative value and structure: law as impartial, objective, and remote; law as a game shaped by self-interest and individual resources; law as a power to be resisted. Other research on legal consciousness, which examined people’s experiences and understandings of how the law should respond to offensive public speech, found interesting variation in responses by race and gender ( Nielsen 2004 ). Engel and Munger (2003) examined how people with disabilities understood and used the new rights conferred by the American for Disabilities Act. The authors concluded that individual identity was key to perceptions of, and experience with, legal rights. Scholars of law and politics should find intriguing material here to integrate with research on political participation, framing of issues, critical race theory, or feminist jurisprudence.

2.4 Other Areas of Law and Society Scholarship

Other areas of law and society scholarship may be more familiar to those in law and politics so I will mention them only briefly.

2.4.1 Regulation and Compliance

Studies of regulation and compliance have been a mainstay of law and society scholarship, encompassing research on compliance with Supreme Court decisions on prayer in schools, implementation of lower court orders on school busing, compliance with environmental, health and safety, or business regulations. Once a legal rule is announced, judicial decision is made, or new regulations go into effect, how do officials secure compliance? Whereas legal scholars try to draw a bright line between law and discretion, many sociolegal scholars would challenge the distinction. Law, it is argued, is constituted by the discretionary decisions that give it meaning. Instead of conceptualizing discretion as “the hole in a doughnut,” surrounded by legal form, as Dworkin (1977) suggested, critics have challenged the very distinction between the two ( Hawkins 1992 ; Pratt 1999 ).

Similarly, the notion of law as purely governmental regulation breaks down entirely with the proliferation of private and quasi-public actors whose support is critical for the success of any regulatory regime. In place of command and control models of regulation, some point to the empirical and normative advantages of self-regulation ( Gunningham and Rees 1997 ). Important comparative work on regulation by Kagan (2001) identifies the very different approaches of Britain and the U.S. and critiques what he calls the “adversarial legalism” of the American system.

2.4.2 Legal History

One of the critical influences on the development of law and society was Willard Hurst and his focus on legal history . His view of law as deeply grounded in the social and economic context of its time shaped generations of scholars studying particular laws, judicial decisions, or legal movements ( Simon 1999 ). The notion of law and society as mutually constitutive emerges clearly in much of the sociolegal historical scholarship (e.g. Gordon 1988 ; Hartog 2000 ), and especially in work on race and the law ( Gomez 2004 ).

Friedman and Ladinsky’s (1967) well-known account of the rise of workman’s compensation law in the early twentieth century reflects a critical eye toward the autonomy of law. After charting the demise of the common law tort doctrine of the fellow-servant rule, they ask whether law was simply “lagging” behind society. Their answer, quite familiar to law and society scholars forty years later, was a resounding “NO.” What was seen as “lag” to some was simply vested interests claiming their power. The old tort doctrine lasted as long as it did because there was no stable compromise behind its replacement. Many similar legal changes would benefit from reexamination by political scientists who have studied American political development and could bring new understandings of the political contexts for change as well as informing law and politics scholars about important areas of the common law they have overlooked.

2.4.2 Procedural Justice

Procedural justice questions have also been explored for decades by those interested in integrating philosophical questions of justice with psychological research and people’s experiences with law. Applying the philosophical distinction between procedural and substantive justice to the legal system, psychologists hypothesized that providing fair and transparent court procedures would result in greater satisfaction and compliance regardless of the substantive outcome of their case. Tyler’s (1990) work on Why People Obey the Law generated a large body of research testing this idea, and finding considerable support. Other researchers extended the research to litigant satisfaction in felony cases according to the perceived fairness of the procedures ( Casper, Tyler, and Fisher 1988 ) and to acceptance of unpopular decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court ( Gibson 1989 ; cf. Tyler and Rasinski 1991 ).

3 Recent Developments

Although the law and society field lacks clear boundaries to separate its interdisciplinary perspective from the other disciplines, it has significantly aided our understanding of law and politics through the various areas of research discussed here. I have already referred to some promising avenues for future research on law and politics. Let me just outline a few others.

Look beyond appellate courts. There has been little recent research on American trial courts, despite huge changes in the balance of federal to local legal power, a massive increase in incarceration, a wealth of quantitative data on state courts available from the National Center for State Courts, and the creation of new types of specialized courts for drugs or mental health. Further study of trial courts and tribunals in other countries would add greatly to our comparative knowledge of courts. Law and society work on international disputing through arbitration ( Dezalay and Garth 1998 ) and on the international Tuna Court (“the world’s premier fish market;” Feldman 2006 , 313) show the potential for integrating norms, disputing, and law. Numerous other regional and international bodies could be studied as well to help us understand processes of law and globalization.

Broaden the range of legal actors to study beyond judges and beyond the arena of public law. Integrate studies of the legal profession with our understanding of courts and lawmaking. By combining the specialization of the bar with the sorting process of legal education that shapes the class, race, and gender of who enters (and remains) in corporate law, one might gain new understanding of the outcomes in different legal areas. The phrase “public law” is highly misleading given the range of public policy concerns and effects that emerge from areas of “private” law ( Shapiro 1972 ). Private law areas of tort, property, contracts, labor, and family contain a wealth of interesting law and politics questions that would benefit from the scrutiny of political science. In punitive damages, for example, juries and trial judges were completely free (until very recent constitutional limits were imposed) to impose civil punishments for fraud or negligence. Why not do the same kind of rigorous investigation of damage awards that has been done for criminal sentencing to explore the determinants of punitive damages?

Examine how people use courts, harking back to a view of litigation as a form of political participation. Integrate perspectives from identity politics, legal consciousness, critical race theory, and feminist jurisprudence, with knowledge of legal institutions and processes. Examine test case litigation to see how changed conditions and new modes of communication have altered the strategies of interest groups.

Popular culture involves framing problems, events, and people. Law is increasingly seen as a set of visual images in popular culture. How do those visuals affect law? Political scientists with an interest in capital punishment should consider Haney’s (2005) excellent book on the death penalty. Haney combines decades of psychological research on jury decision-making in death cases with research on popular culture and public opinion to present a disturbing look at the forces that maintain capital punishment in law.

In sum, the field of law and society continues to develop in response to new restarch questions and new scholars. Political scientists contribute to, and learn from, this interdisciplinary approach to law and politics.

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Center for the Study of Law and Society

Established in 1961, the Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS)  provides a global home for the multidisciplinary study of law and society.  Our goal is to raise awareness and engagement with the empirical study of law and society and build community among multidisciplinary socio-legal scholars.  CSLS brings together U.C. Berkeley faculty and graduate students as well as visiting scholars from across the United States and abroad to examine empirically important issues in law and society and influence policy and public dialogue. 

The Center convenes scholarly presentations, conferences, and workshops designed to exchange ideas and explore new concepts and perspectives.  It also encourages and supports empirical research and theoretical analysis of the social consequences of law, including legal institutions and processes, the impact of law on individuals and groups, and social, political, and intellectual influences on law.  It supports scores of graduate students from across the Berkeley campus through small grants and fellowships to support their original research.  In recent years, the Center’s primary substantive focus has been on criminal justice, inequality, and democracy and civil society.  

Research Programs

• Empirical Legal Studies : CSLS has long been an intellectual home for empirical studies focused on the intersection of law and society. Today, empirical legal studies at UC Berkeley are characterized by a rich interdisciplinary approach that grounds empirical analysis in socio-legal theory and embraces a broad range of methods, both quantitative and qualitative. As interest in empirical legal studies grew throughout the legal academy, CSLS and Berkeley Law began the Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies (BELS) Program in 2006. Its multiple aspects include: Grant Writing; Workshops and Conferences; Technical Assistance; and the BELS Graduate Fellows Program.
• Litigation, Courts, and Criminal Justice : The study of litigation, courts, and criminal justice processes has been central to the work of CSLS since its beginning.  Affiliated scholars study comparative judicial behavior, the development of European Union law, penal policy and patterns of incarceration, the privatization of corrections, prison conditions litigation, historical and contemporary police, and criminal justice system processes.
• Legal Profession :  Several CSLS-affiliated scholars are engaged in empirical work about the legal profession both in the United States and abroad.  These projects include investigating the factors related to law students choosing public interest careers and staying in public interest work over the long term, the role of public interest law firms in democracy and civil society, legal mobilization and lawyers in contemporary China, and the expansion of authoritarian legality through courts and the legal profession in China.
• Gender, Social Policy, and the Law : CSLS has administered several externally funded projects on law, teenage pregnancy, sex education policy, and work and family policy. Affiliated faculty are examining the decline of families under globalization and its implications for law, as well continuing historical research on women and crime.  Affiliated faculty also are studying gendered dynamics around work and family policy, including judicial and organizational responses to these policies and bias against mothers and leave takers in the workplace.
• Civil Rights and Racial Justice : Many CSLS projects involve inquiries into civil rights and racial justice.  Current work examines whether the negative effects of unemployment vary with race; the public health consequences of police violence; the experience of Black women, men, and youth with the criminal justice system, policing, and various forms of violence; the development of legal mechanisms to create conditions for eliminating health disparities; public opinion and survey research about racial variation in attitudes and voting; and considering race in theories of deliberative and participatory democracy.
• Legal History : CSLS has a rich tradition of supporting historical studies, working with UC Berkeley's distinguished group of scholars who specialize in the history of law, courts, and legal processes. Areas of research include economic history and the history of federalism, civil liberties and the welfare state, the experience of African Americans with the legal system after Reconstruction, as well as Asian-American encounters with the American legal system.  Affiliates are conducting research on colonial and 19th century legal history; African Americans’ encounter  with the law from the Civil War to the modern civil rights movement; and the history of organized labor and labor law at the turn of the twentieth century.
• Law, Organizations, Employment and Schools : Research on law and organizations has become a major focus of scholarship at CSLS.  Affiliated scholars conduct research on the role of organizational institutions in judicial construction of civil rights law, the legal consciousness of employees and employers, public interest law firms as advocacy organizations, and the social psychology of discrimination and legal consciousness in schools.  CSLS also hosts the Center for Law and the Workplace (CLAW), which provides a core institutional center for student and faculty professional and scholarly development around the law of work and promotes cross-disciplinary scholarship to address pressing, contemporary  employment-related policy concerns.  Faculty affiliated with CLAW and CSLS are empirically studying issues related to employment in academia, including whether biases exist in STEM faculty hiring and possible interventions to improve equity and inclusion in university hiring, as well as the gendered effects of the COVID19 pandemic on faculty experiences and productivity. 
• Regulatory Studies : CSLS actively supports and encourages research and scholarly interaction concerning the politics and implementation of regulatory and administrative regimes. Recent areas of study include globalization and regulation, ocean law, and policy and corporate compliance and organization theory.  Externally funded research projects have included major studies of comparative regulatory methods, comparative environmental regulation, corporate environmental performance, and the response to strong legal penalties in U.S. environmental law.
• Jurisprudential Studies : The intellectual life of CSLS is enriched by a commitment to interaction among legal philosophers and empirically-oriented socio-legal scholars.  In this respect, the Center is advancing the intellectual agenda of the late Professor Emeritus Philip Selznick, its "founding father," who promoted a normatively and philosophically-inspired vision of socio-legal studies. This combined emphasis remains one of the striking features of Berkeley's CSLS.

CSLS Speaker Series

The Center for the Study of Law and Society hosts the CSLS Speaker Series, a weekly series of lunchtime presentations.  Each year an average of 25 lectures and talks are presented by scholars engaged in socio-legal research from UC Berkeley, other U.S. universities and abroad.

Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies (BELS) Graduate Fellowship

BELS fellows are doctoral students drawn from a wide range of disciplines across the UC Berkeley campus, including (but not limited to) those in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Biological Sciences, International Studies and Area Studies, Schools of Public Health, Business, and Public Policy, Colleges of Natural Sciences and Engineering, as well as from the School of Law (PhD, JD and JSD).  Fellows receive up to $1,000 dollars for research related expenses, attend monthly workshops with other BELS fellows to present and discuss their research, participate in CSLS activities, such as the Empirical Research Methods Workshops, the CSLS Speaker Series, and other conferences and events. 

Conferences and Workshops

CSLS sponsors special academic meetings, workshops, and conferences, often in collaboration with other campus units, and often resulting in books and other publications.  In recent years, conference topics have included: environmental protection and deterrence; law and society in China; the work of Martin Shapiro; the work of Harry N. Scheiber; Virtues and Vices of Legalism, honoring the work of Robert A. Kagan; and Building Theory Through Empirical Legal Studies.  CSLS organizes a series of Workshops on Empirical Research Methods, a series of interviews with founders and leading scholars in the field entitled Conversations in Law and Society, and a year-long seminar for graduate student fellows, the Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies (BELS) Graduate Fellowship.  CSLS also sponsors conferences and workshops for the dissemination and discussion of research, the exploration of new ideas for research, and the promotion of new multidisciplinary and cross-national collaborations.

Empirical Research Methods Workshops

Students interested in conducting empirical research on law are trained on a wide range of empirical methods, both quantitative and qualitative.  Leading experts, including some of our own faculty, facilitate occasional workshops on particular methodologies.  Past workshops are archived on our web page.

Conversations in Law and Society

Taped in front of a live audience at Berkeley Law School, this online video archive displays engaging conversations with the founders and leading figures of the field of law and society.

Publications and Blogs

CSLS along with the doctoral program, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, publishes two electronic Working Paper Series in the University of California eScholarship Repository.

CSLS Library

The Center maintains a small non-circulating library of interdisciplinary socio-legal journals (and some disciplinary journals), books, and house bound copies of most of the doctoral dissertations of graduates of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program.

Catherine Albiston Email [email protected] Telephone (510) 642-0493

Pamela Erickson Email [email protected] Telephone (510) 642-4038

2240 Piedmont Ave (JSP Bldg), Berkeley, CA 94720 - 2150 (510) 642-4038

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Related Guides

• Mass Incarceration A research guide on mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex.
• Gender and Sexuality Studies A guide that provides an overview of gender and sexuality studies resources and materials available through NYU Libraries and beyond.
• NYU Law Library Guides Research guides on various specialized legal topics, which are maintained by the staff at the NYU Law Library.
• Data Sources: Crime A round up of major data sources on crime.

Databases for Finding Law Review Articles and Related Literature

Use the databases listed on this page in addition to core sociology and criminology databases, depending on your topic.

• Law Journal Library This link opens in a new window Law Journal Library is a collection of more than 1,250 law and law-related periodicals. Coverage is from the first issue published for all periodicals and goes through the most current issue allowed.
• Law Library Microform Consortium Digital (LLMC) This link opens in a new window Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC) is a non-profit cooperative of libraries dedicated to preserving legal titles and government documents while making copies available digitally through its on-line service LLMC-Digital. Users can access scanned copies of newsletters and legal documents.
• Legal Source (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window Legal Source provides access to an extensive range of full-text legal content. It offers information centered on the discipline of law and legal topics, such as criminal justice, international law, federal law, organized crime, medical law, labor and human resource law, ethics, and the environment. Legal Source includes the Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective and the Index to Legal Periodicals & Books.
• Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals This link opens in a new window Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals is a multilingual index to articles and book reviews in publications appearing worldwide. The collection provides in-depth coverage of public and private international law, comparative and foreign law, and the law of all jurisdictions other than the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia. IFLP also analyzes the contents of individually published collections of legal essays, Festschriften, Mélanges, and congress reports each year. Dates of coverage: 1985 to present.

Databases for Finding Case Laws, Legislation, and Government Documents

• Legislative Insight This link opens in a new window Legislative Insight contains access to all of the various publications that become available as as a bill moves through the legislative process on its way to becoming a law. These include the full text of the Public Law itself, all versions of related bills, law-specific Congressional Record excerpts, committee hearings, reports, and prints. Legislative Insight offers a research citation page that not only links to the full text of the associated primary source publications, but also allows the user to search within these documents.
• Lexis Advance This link opens in a new window Lexis Advance gives you access to more than 60,000 legal, news and public records sources, breaking legal news, and access to the latest federal decisions. More information less... Please clear your browser's cache and cookies before attempting to access this resource.
• Thomson Reuters Westlaw Campus Research This link opens in a new window TR Westlaw Campus Research provides access to a comprehensive and widely-used indexing system for caselaw materials to make legal research easier, more accurate, and more relevant.

Background Information

• Handbook of Law and Society The Handbook of Law and Society presents a comprehensive overview of key research findings, theoretical developments, and methodological controversies in the field of law and society.
• Research Handbook on the Sociology of Law This unique research handbook maps the historical, theoretical, and methodological concepts in sociology of law, exploring the rich and complex nature of this area of research. It argues that sociology of law flourishes due to its strong capacity for interdisciplinary engagement and links to other scientific concepts, methodologies and research fields.
• Routledge Handbook of Law and Society This innovative handbook provides a comprehensive, and truly global, overview of the main approaches and themes within law and society scholarship or social-legal studies. The authors were carefully chosen to achieve a diverse and non-Eurocentric view of socio-legal studies.
• Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory This handbook sets out an innovative approach to the theory of law, reconceptualising it in a material, embodied, socially contextualised and politically radical way. The book brings the law into active discussion with other disciplines, as well as supra-disciplinary debates on the areas of spatiality, temporality, materiality, corporeality and sensorial studies, capturing the most exciting developments in current legal theory, and anticipating future research in the area.
• Routledge Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Methods Drawing on a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this handbook explores theoretical and empirical perspectives that address the articulation of law in society, and the social character of the rule of law. Rather than seeking to define the field of socio-legal studies, this book takes up the experiences of researchers within the field. First-hand accounts of socio-legal research projects allow the reader to engage with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches within this fluid interdisciplinary area.
• Oxford Bibliographies: Law and Society Cites a multidisciplinary literature -- while privileging sociological titles -- on the mutual relationship between law and society with its different actors, institutions, and processes.
• Oxford Bibliographies: Sociology of Law Summarizes the evolution of the sociology of law from its early classical writings to its modern theoretical and methodological approaches.
• Foreign Law Guide This link opens in a new window The Foreign Law Guide (FLG) offers information on sources of foreign law, including complete bibliographic citations to legislation, the existence of English translations, and selected references to secondary sources in one virtual destination. Broad in content and global in scope, the FLG is an indispensable resource for comparative law research and a fundamental tool for developing a foreign and comparative law collection.

Nonprofit Organizations

• Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY) envisions the United States becoming a society that respects all children’s human rights and nurtures their capacity to become leaders, responding to any harm they cause in ways that are rooted in their dignity and unique potential for change. CFSY seeks a response to the harm caused by children that is conscientious of childhood traumas, restorative and empowering to all parties, and equitable, especially with regard to race and ethnicity.
• Center for Children’s Law and Policy The Center for Children’s Law and Policy (CCLP) is focused on reform of juvenile justice and other systems that affect troubled and at-risk children, and protection of the rights of children in those systems. CCLP is working to create a world where the response to youth who get in trouble with the law is developmentally appropriate, free of racial and ethnic bias, and focused on building strengths that help youth thrive in their own communities.
• Coalition for Juvenile Justice The Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) is a nationwide coalition of State Advisory Groups (SAGs) and allies dedicated to preventing children and youth from becoming involved in the courts and upholding the highest standards of care when youth are charged with wrongdoing and enter the justice system.
• Equal Justice Initiative The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society. Founded in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson, a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer and bestselling author of Just Mercy , EJI provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons, challenging the death penalty and excessive punishment and providing re-entry assistance to formerly incarcerated people.
• The Innocence Project The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law, exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. Its mission is to free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment.
• The Marshall Project The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. It has an impact on the system through journalism, rendering it more fair, effective, transparent and humane. Although not an advocate, The Marshall Project often spurs change. Its journalism exposes wrongs, bringing them to the attention of officials who can take action. It gives visibility to proposals and critiques from the criminal justice community. And it tries to set an example for other media to cover criminal justice issues fairly and responsibly.
• National Center for Juvenile Justice The National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ) is the oldest juvenile justice research group in the United States. NCJJ's mission is effective justice for children and families through research and technical assistance. For four decades, NCJJ has conducted research and provided objective, factual information that professionals and decision makers in the juvenile and family justice system use to increase effectiveness.
• National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) works to reduce incarceration and violence, improve the outcomes of system-involved youth and adults, and increase the capacity and expertise of the organizations that serve these individuals. NICJR provides technical assistance, consulting, research, organizational development, and advocacy in the fields of juvenile and criminal justice, youth development, and violence prevention. NICJR works with an array of organizations, including government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropic foundations.
• National Juvenile Justice Network The National Juvenile Justice Network (NJJN) leads a membership community of 58 state-based organizations and numerous individuals across 42 states and DC. NJJN seeks to shrink our youth justice systems and transform the remainder into systems that treat youth and families with dignity and humanity.
• REFORM Alliance REFORM Alliance aims to transform probation and parole by changing laws, systems and culture to create real pathways to work and wellbeing. A justice system that holds people accountable and redirects back to work and wellbeing leads to stronger families and safer communities. Instead of keeping people trapped in a revolving door from probation/parole to prison — which costs taxpayers billions of dollars — REFORM is working to move people from the justice system into stability.
• The Sentencing Project The Sentencing Project promotes effective and humane responses to crime that minimize imprisonment and criminalization of youth and adults by promoting racial, ethnic, economic, and gender justice. Its policy priorities envision the full inclusion in society of people with criminal records and an end to extreme punishments. Its aim is to center the leadership, voices, vision, and experience of those directly affected by mass incarceration to make the rationale for systemic change vivid, credible and compelling.
• Vera Institute of Justice The Vera Institute of Justice's mission is to end the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty to create safe, healthy, empowered communities and a fair, accountable justice system.

Data Sources

• Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) This link opens in a new window Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research center at Syracuse University, has developed a web-based data warehouse/data mining application that makes it possible to produce useful information from previously inaccessible data. The TRACFed data warehouse includes among its many offerings transactional data from the US Federal government concerning its enforcement and prosecution activities, staffing, federal expenditures, and more. It focuses on the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, IRS, DEA and the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
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John Locke Research Paper

The Enlightenment Philosopher in the 17th and 18th centuries that was able to shape society was John Locke. John Locke was able to shape society because he was able to protect the three natural rights of “Life, Liberty, and Property.” Locke believed that these basic human laws of nature were the preservation of mankind. The Enlightenment period highlighted the individual rights, and the transformation of the ideas of societal structures. The Enlightenment was able to promote the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. John Locke was known for his influential work ‘Two Treatises of Government’, the idea that political authority should be based on the consent of the governed. Locke emphasized the natural rights that included life, liberty, …show more content…

Liberals did not accept the natural law, which provided the background to Locke’s rights. Locke’s theory of actual and consent, he emphasized, is that individuals are born into societies whose governmental structures are subjected to their actual consent. The ideas challenged traditional notions of education, advocating for reason, critical thinking, and knowledge. John Locke was able to influence the educational philosophies which outlined his work “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” he emphasized the importance of a child’s natural curiosity through sensory experiences. The features of the standardization of programmers, strict equivalence was able to endure and result in the establishment of consistent national norms. Locke discussed the true secret of education being that we should convince children to want to learn. In the learning space to allow students to be inquisitive and curious, he warned against learning a task or something that students had to do. John Locke was so strong on the idea of education because he believed that education played a crucial role in the development and social integration of any human …show more content…

Traditional forms of authority and being able to promote principles such as reason, individual liberty, and the rule of law. Locke’s political philosophy argued that individuals had the right to rebel against the government. The effort challenged existing power structures and had the idea that political authority should be based on consent. He advocated limited government, emphasizing that political authority should be constrained by the rule of law and protection with defined power. Throughout Europe, the ideas were questioned because of traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change. The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. This marked the scientific method and reductionism along with increased questioning of religious practice. In conclusion, the Enlightenment Philosopher of the 17th and 18th centuries who was able to shape society was John

More about John Locke Research Paper

Law students earn top honours at the 2024 Copyright Policy Moot

The team, comprised of Jessica Dupuis, Sulayman Syed,  and Kate Winiarz , is the first in the moot’s history to receive first place honours in both award categories, and rounds out a year of successes for the intellectual property advocacy program offered by the Centre for Law, Technology and Society and the Faculy of Law.

A unique moot, the  Canadian Copyright Policy Moot is a copyright policy competition put on jointly by Heritage Canada and Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada, in collaboration with the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology, and Society.

Teams of students select their own copyright issues and pitch policy reform proposal directly to policymakers from the federal government. They write and submit a full Memorandum to Cabinet, and then present the proposed policy orally at the briefing competition in Ottawa.

This year, six teams from University of Toronto, McGill University, Université de Montréal, and the University of Ottawa – from the Common Law Section and from the Civil Law Section – defended policy proposals at the oral briefing competition .  Teams from the Université de Montréal and McGill University joined the Common Law Section’s team in the final round.

Recognizing Indigenous communal authorship

While students select their own copyright issues, several teams centered their proposal on Indigenous knowledge and the Copyright Act, including the Common Law Section’s team and the runner-up from McGill University.

Building on and enhancing the Faculty of Law’s strengths in  Aboriginal Law and Indigenous Legal Traditions , the Common Law Section’s team aimed to advance our individual and collective commitment to reconciliation and the decolonization of legal learning in response to the  TRC's calls to action .

The team proposed a system for the recognition of Indigenous communal authorship in the Copyright Act after reviewing the recommendations of Indigenous groups themselves. These recommendations were found in numerous reports, studies, consultations, international comparisons, and other initiatives spanning multiple decades. The team worked together for nearly six months, immersed in the nuances of policymaking, copyright law, and Indigenous legal traditions.

For the team, amending the Act to recognize Indigenous communal authorship presents two opportunities for Indigenous communities: allowing them to benefit economically from, and protect against culturally offensive use of, third party use of works of Indigenous Knowledge. The advent of generative artificial intelligence and text and data mining practices that absorb and reproduce works of Indigenous Knowledge present the impetus for expedient action to provide adequate protection to these works.

Indigenous stakeholders in Canada have formally requested some form of collective rights holding and protection from misappropriation for Indigenous Knowledge since at least 1999, and informally for centuries. The 2019 Statutory Review of the Act recognized that “[i]n Indigenous Communities it is usually a group or society, rather than an individual, who holds the knowledge or expressions. These groups monitor or control the use of these expressions to pass on important knowledge, cultural values, and belief systems to later generations.”

Based on the recommendations of many Indigenous communities, organizations, and individuals in multiple committee studies, reports, and initiatives, the team proposed a framework to ensure works of Indigenous Knowledge enjoy the benefits of copyright. Their Memorandum to Cabinet proposed to deem Indigenous Communities as a new type of author of works of Indigenous Knowledge, and adapts moral rights for Indigenous communal authors to explicitly protect against culturally offensive use of works of Indigenous Knowledge. They also proposed to established a body for the collective administration of the communally owned works of IK. This body determines what constitutes culturally offensive use of Indigenous Knowledge, administers tariffs and royalties, and settles disputes. Their proposal also defines qualified works of Indigenous Knowledge, eligible Indigenous Communities, and culturally offensive use.

In the final round, the team was able to convince a panel of Canada’s leading copyright policymakers: Nathalie Théberge , Vice-Chair and Chief Executive Officer, and Lara Taylor , Secretary General of the Copyright Board of Canada; Owen Ripley , Associate Assistant Deputy Minister, Cultural Affairs at Canadian Heritage ; and Mark Schaan , Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategy and Innovation Policy, and Samir Chhabra , Director General, Marketplace Framework Policy Branch, at Innovation, Science and Economic Development. The expert panel was impressed by their thoughtful research, briefing skills and how they anticipated some of the panel’s most complex questions.

The honourable mentions, for both the Best Memorandum of Cabinet and Best Policy Briefing, went to Julian Guidote and Grace Forster from McGill University with a proposal pushing for the protection of Indigenous knowledge in the Copyright Act using the Act Respecting First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Children Youth and Family as a model.

Both teams were delighted to share ideas on such an important topic and to see a momentum pushing for self-governance and nation-to-nation relationships and underscored the importance of policy action on Indigenous rights.

A successful year for the University of Ottawa

The Centre for Law, Technology and Society is extremely proud to foster an active learning environment and provide  such unique experiences to our students !

These accolades further enhance the University of Ottawa’s national and international reputation for mooting excellence in general and in IP law specifically. Indeed, this year, our IP moot teams also took home top honours at the  Harold G. Fox Intellectual Property Moot and the  Oxford International Intellectual Property Moot .

This is the first time that the IP advocacy program’s teams have all come home winners – winning both domestic and international moots, and the Copyright Policy Moot in a single year.

Such a year of success is due to the University of Ottawa’s  world-class training in all dimensions of IP advocacy . Students participating in the Canadian Copyright Policy Moot join colleagues competing in the Oxford International Intellectual Property Moot and the Fox IP Moot together in this pair of boutique courses only taught at uOttawa: written and oral advocacy in intellectual property

The team was coach by Professor  Jeremy de Beer  and our in-house litigators  David Fewer  and  Christian Clavette from the  Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic who could not be more thrilled when the results were announced. David Fewer remarked “We couldn't be happier with the dedication of our mooters and learning outcomes of the process. We are particularly impressed by the teamwork and selflessness this team displayed. Their exceptional support of their mooting colleagues was noted and appreciated.”

In addition, Jessica Dupuis, Sulayman Syed,  and Kate Winiarz accessed invaluable mentorship in the production of their Memorandum to Cabinet and preparation to the oral presentation from several people. They were notably supported by professors Chidi Oguamanam and  Elizabeth Judge , as well as PhD student Anmol Patel as well as former student Jeremiah Baarbé now at the Copyright Board. Meika Ellis , Rachel Kuchma , Julia Kafato , Ana Nizharade , Scott Robertson , and Ashley Seely , now in private practice, each used their unique skills and experience to provide valuable feedback at every step of the way. The team’s success is directly tied to the generosity of these experts.

The team, known internally as the “Copycats”, displayed team spirit as part of the overall IP mooting program. Whether the Copycats were showing up for an 8 am Fox Moot practice with coffee and breakfast or wishing the Oxford Moot team well with travel goodies, camaraderie was front and centre. The team’s success is directly attributable to the support of both the Oxford and Fox moot teams as they provided feedback, encouragement, and much-needed laughter.

Our warmest congratulations to the team, and all participants to the Copyright Policy Moot!

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A majority of those who say it’s headed in the wrong direction say a major reason is that schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.

What Public K-12 Teachers Want Americans To Know About Teaching

Many public K-12 teachers say people should know that teaching is hard job, and that teachers care about students and deserve respect.

Public K-12 teachers express low job satisfaction and few are optimistic about the future of U.S. education.

62% of U.S. adults under 30 say they use TikTok, compared with 39% of those ages 30 to 49, 24% of those 50 to 64, and 10% of those 65 and older.

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Two-thirds or more in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam say that women should decide for themselves whether to bear children.

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Americans’ top policy priority for 2024: strengthening the economy.

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Majorities of adults see decline of union membership as bad for the U.S. and working people

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8 charts on technology use around the world

In most countries surveyed, around nine-in-ten or more adults are online. In South Korea, 99% of adults use the internet.

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Majorities in most countries surveyed say social media is good for democracy.

Across 27 countries surveyed, people generally see social media as more of a good thing than a bad thing for democracy.

Americans’ Social Media Use

YouTube and Facebook are by far the most used online platforms among U.S. adults. But TikTok’s user base has grown significantly in recent years: 33% of U.S. adults now say they use it, up from 21% in 2021.

How U.S. Adults Use TikTok

About half of all U.S. adults who use TikTok have never posted a video themselves. And the top 25% of U.S. adults on the site by posting volume produce 98% of all publicly accessible videos from this group. Users who have posted videos are generally more active on the platform than non-posters.

Race & Ethnicity

Latinos’ views on the migrant situation at the u.s.-mexico border.

U.S. Hispanics are less likely than other Americans to say increasing deportations or a larger wall along the border will help the situation.

U.S. Christians more likely than ‘nones’ to say situation at the border is a crisis

Majorities of White Christian groups say the large number of migrants seeking to enter at the border with Mexico is a “crisis” for the United States.

Black Americans’ Views on Success in the U.S.

While Black adults define personal and financial success in different ways, most see these measures of success as major sources of pressure in their lives.

Among Black adults, those with higher incomes are most likely to say they are happy

Black adults in upper-income families are about twice as likely as those in lower-income families to say they are extremely or very happy.

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .