While the U.S. Code is well-organized and curated, the legal text remains nearly impenetrable for non-lawyers. In this paper, the authors treat the U.S. Code as a citation network and explore its complexity using traditional network metrics.
Network Measures of the United States Code
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The U.S. Code represents the codification of the laws of the United States. While it is a well-organized and curated corpus of documents, the legal text remains nearly impenetrable for non-lawyers. In this paper, we treat the U.S. Code as a citation network and explore its complexity using traditional network metrics. We find interesting topical patterns emerge from the citation structure and begin to interpret network metrics in the context of the legal corpus. This approach has potential for determining policy dependency and robustness, as well as modeling of future policies.