Seminar  |  04/26/2017 | 12:00 PM  –  01:30 PM

Brown Bag Seminar: Measuring the Law - A Network Science Perspective on Constitutional Jurisprudence

Corinna Coupette (Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance)

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

How is law structured? How does it change over time? These questions lie at the heart of legal scholarship, but they are mostly answered in narratives. Network science opens an alternative avenue, leveraging concepts from graph theory to quantify, visualize, and model legal structures and legal change. This talk draws on an original dataset of Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) decisions to illustrate how the network science perspective can enhance our understanding of German constitutional jurisprudence and to carve out more generally the promises and perils of measuring the law.

Contact person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler