Measuring the impact of technology on the law

It’s dif­fi­cult to come up with more quan­ti­ta­tive mea­sure­ments to look at how tech­nol­ogy has impacted law. One could look at the devel­op­ment of new tech­nolo­gies (via patent appli­ca­tions, per­haps?) and then look to see how soon after­wards the inven­tion began to show up in legal cases. Another inter­est­ing idea would be to see if changes in tech­nol­ogy – the devel­op­ment of new cita­tion sys­tems, more rapid dis­sem­i­na­tion of deci­sions and pub­li­ca­tions, and later the cre­ation of elec­tronic repos­i­to­ries such as Lexis and Westlaw – had any impact on the way lawyers and judges devel­oped law.

Certainly tex­tual and cita­tion analy­sis approaches are not new. The sci­en­tific com­mu­nity has been ana­lyz­ing cita­tion pat­terns to deter­mine influ­ence since the 1960s and the devel­op­ment of the Science Citation Index. In the law, Shepherd’s and KeyCite are two com­pet­ing meth­ods to help deter­mine the influ­ence of legal cases through cita­tion analysis.

My idea, though, is to use sim­i­lar tech­niques to try to mea­sure the impact of new tech­nolo­gies on both court­room deci­sions, both sub­stan­tively and – for lack of a bet­ter term – stylistically.

As an exam­ple of the first con­cept, X-rays were devel­oped around 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen. How soon after their devel­op­ment did courts begin to refer to them? CCTV (sur­veil­lance cam­eras) were first used in the U.S. around 1968 – how long was it before courts began to grap­ple with the issues? Did it take more or less time than with X-rays? (Obviously I would need a num­ber of other examples.)

My sec­ond con­cept is to see if, for exam­ple, the num­ber of cita­tions in opin­ions – or the length of opin­ions, for that mat­ter – increased or decreased as tech­nol­ogy changed. Did the intro­duc­tion of type­writ­ers cor­re­late to increases in opin­ion length or num­ber of opin­ions per year per judge? Did the devel­op­ment of cita­tion index­ing sys­tems like KeyCite increase the num­ber of cita­tions? Have online and elec­tronic sys­tems increased the num­ber of cita­tions? Similarly, have the types of cita­tions changed? (One way to grossly mea­sure this would be to look at how old the cases cited are when viewed from the per­spec­tive of the new decision.)

Here’s a few exam­ples of related ideas:

• Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court
• The Hazards of Precedent: A Parameterization of Legal Change
• History of Citation Indexing (from Thomson Reuters)

Thoughts? Opinions? Anyone done sim­i­lar work to this, per­haps in another field? What tools might work best?

Related arti­cles by Zemanta

• Harvard ref­er­ence or cita­tion gen­er­a­tor (dairyscience.info)
• Papers with more ref­er­ences are cited more often (ebiquity.umbc.edu)
• Social cita­tions: using Mendeley API to mea­sure cita­tion read­er­ship (iphylo.blogspot.com)
• Impact Factors (healthlinks.washington.edu)