LexNLP is an open source Python package focused on natural language processing and machine learning for legal and regulatory text. The package includes functionality to (i) segment documents, (ii) identify key text such as titles and section headings, (iii) extract over eighteen types of...

Acyclic digraphs arise in many natural and artificial processes. Among the broader set, dynamic citation networks represent a substantively important form of acyclic digraphs. For example, the study of such networks includes the spread of ideas through academic citations, the spread of...

There are fundamental differences between citation networks and other classes of graphs. In particular, given that citation networks are directed and acyclic, methods developed primarily for use with undirected social network data may face obstacles. This is particularly true for the dynamic...

Citation networks are a cornerstone of network research and have been important to the general development of network theory. Citation data have the advantage of constituting a well-defined set where the nature of nodes and edges is reasonably well specified. Much interesting and important work...

As its structure offers one causal mechanism for the emergence of and convergence upon a collective conception of what constitutes a sound legal rule, we believe the social structure of the American law professoriate is an important piece of a broader model of American common law development....

A social system is susceptible to perturbation when its collective properties depend sensitively on a few, pivotal components. Using the information geometry of minimal models from statistical physics, we develop an approach to identify pivotal components to which coarse-grained, or aggregate,...

What happens when the Supreme Court of the United States decides a case impacting one or more publicly-traded firms? While many have observed anecdotal evidence linking decisions or oral arguments to abnormal stock returns, few have rigorously or systematically investigated the behavior of...

Scholars have increasingly investigated “crowdsourcing” as an alternative to expert-based judgment or purely data-driven approaches to predicting the future. Under certain conditions, scholars have found that crowd-sourcing can outperform these other approaches. However, despite interest in...

Over the last 23 years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has required over 34,000 companies to file over 165,000 annual reports. These reports, the so-called "Form 10-Ks," contain a characterization of a company's financial performance and its risks, including the regulatory...

Einstein’s razor, a corollary of Ockham’s razor, is often paraphrased as follows: make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. This rule of thumb describes the challenge that designers of a legal system face — to craft simple laws that produce desired ends, but not to pursue...