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Court Decisions: 99 % Uncharted Deep Sea? Mapping the Blind Spot of Digital Legal Studies over Half a Century (1971-2019)

DOI 10.25527/re.2022.01
Legal research increasingly turns to systematic analyses of large amounts of legal text. Current research programs such as Big Data Legal Scholarship, Evidence-Based Jurisprudence, Law & Corpus Linguistics, Computer-Assisted Legal Linguistics, and Law as Data all rely (one way or another) on digitizing or collecting, collectively analysing and quantifying features of text corpora from various genres. First and foremost among these genres are court decisions, due to both their normative force (either stare decisis, or de facto) and their easy and legally unconstrained useability: Court decisions are in the public domain pretty much...
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Legal Network Analytics 101

DOI 10.25527/re.2021.11
Abstract: In this article I discuss a network analytic approach to the internal structure of German laws and regulations, as well as the need for lowering entry barriers to the field. To assist beginners with their first forays into legal network analysis, I provide structural information for almost all German laws and regulations as part of the "Corpus des Deutschen Bundesrechts (C-DBR)". This structural information is available in the widely used GraphML format and includes pre-computed visual representations for initial orientation. I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of five different kinds of hierarchical graph visualizations (classical dendrogram, two types of circular dendrogram, circle packing and sunburst diagrams) and provide step-by-step instructions...
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Online Symposium “Empirical Turn”

DOI 10.25527/re.2020.06
Ten years ago, German legal researcher Niels Petersen published an academic manifesto (in German, accompanied by an abstract in English) analysing whether continental jurisprudence might need an "empirical turn". His article provoked various responses, including a sharply worded backlash by Ino Augsberg who criticized the "recent empiricist tone in jurisprudence". Ten years later, we revisit the debate in an Online Symposium by Law's|Empirics. Are we any wiser today? Did the passage of time vindicate one view or the other? Or was the disagreement solely about words, maybe even a misunderstanding? Our symposium lets both authors revisit the issue and update the debate, in addition to other contributors whom we asked about their views. All symposium articles...
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Online-Symposien, Online-Symposium Empirische Wende, Wissenschaftliche Beiträge
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Online-Symposium Empirische Wende, Wissenschaftliche Beiträge
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Correspondence Experiments in Law An Empirical Approach to Anti-Discrimination Jurisprudence

DOI 10.25527/re.2020.05
Abstract | German law prohibits certain kinds of discrimination in private contract relationships. How can systemic discrimination be identified though? Recently, studies have employed "correspondence experiments", a type of field experiment related to vignette studies: Researchers assume fictitious identities to enter into contract negotiations, and systematically vary the demographic characteristics of their assumed identity. By measuring the respective reaction of other parties, researchers can therefore isolate the causal effect of specific demographic factors on discriminatory responses. A new study from Germany (just published in the academic journal NZM)...
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