AALS Open Source Program

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Session Type: AALS Open Source Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: Hilton San Francisco Union Square

Room: Golden Gate 4

Floor: Lobby Level

Empirical research assessing the effects of law is now common, and interest is growing in systematically tracking legislation, assessing policy outcomes, and using comparative ranking to promote optimal policies. Such developments highlight the importance of accurate transformation of the words of law into numeric data for research, visualization and comparison. “Scientific legal mapping” is a systematic approach to identifying and encoding legal data that emphasizes transparency, replicability and quality control. This panel will discuss common problems of faulty legal measurement, methods and tools for scientific legal mapping, and how scholars are using scientific legal data in innovative and impactful ways.