The "Web of Law" is more than a figure of speech, according to a draft paper by Prof. Thomas A.C. Smith of Univ. of San Diego School of Law now available on SSRN-The Web of Law by Thomas Smith
As Prof. Smith told me in a recent email, "it presents the preliminary results of a citation study of all US cases, which shows that the legal network is organized as a scale-free network, as the WWW is. Many interesting consequences follow from the scale free structure of the web of law. It implies that law will have self-organizing properties analogous to those of the Web, that advanced searching technologies being used on the WWW (google, cluster.com, teoma) will also work in the Web of Law, that quality or 'fitness' of legal opinions and scholarship can be measured much more rigorously, that the evolution of legal systems can be studied and that it will parallel in many respects the evolution of other scale free networks, and that legal opinions age in predictable ways, putting doctrines of precedent in a different light."
Tom's paper passes my first litmus test for a paper on network theory by citing Duncan J. Watts and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi on the first page. He includes a highly readable backgrounder on network science, and gracefully links it to the world of legal scholarship. His data comes from the assistance of LexisNexis, which performed a "full network scan" of the Web of Law. An important and valuable piece available at: SSRN-The Web of Law by Thomas Smith
DougSimpson.com/blog
Posted by dougsimpson at January 10, 2005 11:08 PM