A mathematical approach to the study of the United States Code

Michael Bommarito () and Daniel M. Katz

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2010, vol. 389, issue 19, 4195-4200

Abstract: The United States Code (Code) is a document containing over 22 million words that represents a large and important source of Federal statutory law. Scholars and policy advocates often discuss the direction and magnitude of changes in various aspects of the Code. However, few have mathematically formalized the notions behind these discussions or directly measured the resulting representations. This paper addresses the current state of the literature in two ways. First, we formalize a representation of the United States Code as the union of a hierarchical network and a citation network over vertices containing the language of the Code. This representation reflects the fact that the Code is a hierarchically organized document containing language and explicit citations between provisions. Second, we use this formalization to measure aspects of the Code as codified in October 2008, November 2009, and March 2010. These measurements allow for a characterization of the actual changes in the Code over time. Our findings indicate that in the recent past, the Code has grown in its amount of structure, interdependence, and language.

Keywords: United States Code; Hierarchical network; Citation network; Language; Computational legal studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:389:y:2010:i:19:p:4195-4200

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2010.05.057

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