DataSheet1_Measuring Law Over Time: A Network Analytical Framework with an Application to Statutes and Regulations in the United States and Germany.PDF

How do complex social systems evolve in the modern world? This question lies at the heart of social physics, and network analysis has proven critical in providing answers to it. In recent years, network analysis has also been used to gain a quantitative understanding of law as a complex adaptive system, but most research has focused on legal documents of a single type, and there exists no unified framework for quantitative legal document analysis using network analytical tools. Against this background, we present a comprehensive framework for analyzing legal documents as multi-dimensional, dynamic document networks. We demonstrate the utility of this framework by applying it to an original dataset of statutes and regulations from two different countries, the United States and Germany, spanning more than twenty years (1998–2019). Our framework provides tools for assessing the size and connectivity of the legal system as viewed through the lens of specific document collections as well as for tracking the evolution of individual legal documents over time. Implementing the framework for our dataset, we find that at the federal level, the United States legal system is increasingly dominated by regulations, whereas the German legal system remains governed by statutes. This holds regardless of whether we measure the systems at the macro, the meso, or the micro level.

当今世界中，复杂社会系统如何演化？这一问题是社会物理学的核心议题，而网络分析已被证明为解答该问题的关键手段。近年来，网络分析也被用于对作为复杂自适应系统（complex adaptive system）的法律展开定量研究，但现有多数研究仅聚焦于单一类型的法律文档，且尚未出现一套可借助网络分析工具开展法律文档定量分析的统一框架。在此背景下，我们提出一套用于将法律文档作为多维动态文档网络进行分析的综合框架。我们通过将该框架应用于一套原创数据集以验证其效用：该数据集涵盖美国与德国两个国家的成文法（statutes）与规章（regulations），时间跨度超过20年（1998年至2019年）。本框架提供两类分析工具：其一可基于特定文档集合的视角评估法律系统的规模与连通性，其二可追踪单个法律文档随时间的演化轨迹。通过将该框架应用于我们的数据集，我们发现：在联邦层面，美国法律系统正日益为规章所主导，而德国法律系统仍以成文法为核心；无论从宏观、中观还是微观层面进行衡量，这一结论均成立。