Understanding differences between legal systems is a central inquiry for scholars of comparative law. The importance of comparative law has increased enormously in recent years due to economic globalization and democratization. The depth and breadth of these comparisons has long been limited by the need to collect data by hand. This project will use machine coding to eliminate this constraint and, in so doing, will vastly expand the nuance and detail that is possible in the comparison of legal systems. The project will analyze the legal codes of a dozen civil law countries (i.e. countries whose private rights and remedies come from a statutory body of rules rather than from judge-made common law) and develop visualization methods so that patterns can be identified quickly. A central unit of analysis will be the internal cross-reference (or the degree to which they refer to other sections of the code), a feature of legal codes that goes back to the Code of Hammurabi, a legal code dating back to almost 3800 years ago in what is now Iraq.
Civil codes vary substantially in the degree to which they contain internal cross-references. This team's preliminary analysis shows that these patterns map to the different philosophies that underlie these bodies of law. For example, the French Civil Code purports to rely on abstract and deductive legal principles while the German Civil Code has been influenced by the idea that legitimacy arises from historical practice. For the French Civil Code, there are very few internal cross-references whereas in the German Civil Code, there is a rich network of cross-references that can be traced back to the first article of the code. Machine coding can thus reveal important and previously unexplored differences in legal codes. The project will develop and define these metrics in a way that will be accessible to comparative scholars as they attempt to understand how and why differences in the law of a country affect outcomes in those countries.
