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The Digital Docket | |||
Overview |
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Previous research of judicial systems has faced a trade-off between large scale quantitative inquiries focused on readily-counted behaviors, and smaller studies that allow closer examination of legal texts. This project, a collaboration between University of Maryland's Government and Politics Department and the College of Information Studies, aims to apply techniques from information retrieval and computational linguistics to the study of the U.S. Supreme Court. By viewing the legal system as an intricate and complex web of communication, the project aims to better understand the role and influences of various actors through analysis of written records. Those records include, for example, briefs written by litigants and other stakeholders, and opinions written by judges and justices. The application of automated content analysis techniques to model the U.S. judicial system represents an opportunity to overcome many of the bottlenecks associated with traditional manual, labor-intensive methods in political science, and also provides a new environment for the advancement of information retrieval and computational linguistic techniques. This project will employ a novel text-based computational model of the legal system with both explanatory and predictive power that will allow us to pose broad classes of theoretically interesting research questions. More importantly, this interdisciplinary approach, applying computational techniques to the study of legal systems, has the potential to revolutionize both the research agendas and the education of future social scientists. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, under award BSC-0624067, from September, 2006 to August, 2009. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed on this Web site are those of the project members and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. | ||||
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