Legal Research and Legal Concepts: Where Form Molds Substance

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. California Law Review, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to California Law Review.When Christopher Columbus Langdell stated that the library was the laboratory of the law and that law books were the "stuff" of legal research he was stating a proposition that was not only descriptive but prescriptive.' From the late nineteenth century, the development of the American legal system can be seen as a history of the development of forms of legal publication. This history poses the question whether the forms of publication have been mere vehicles for the transmission of legal knowledge, or important influences in the development of that knowledge. This Essay has two purposes. First, I will examine the suggestion that the form in which law has been conceptualized was strongly influenced by the form in which it was published. Second, I will explore the impact that current technological innovations in legal research may have on the way legal problems and legal structures will be conceptualized in the future. I SETTINGThe earliest forms of modern legal research materials began to take shape in the eighteenth century. Scholars during the Age of Enlightenment sought to use critical reason to free people from irrational prejudice and influence. They searched for rational systems of expression in the sciences and eventually extended this approach to the study of law. Law was a science, a body of knowledge that had its own structure and was reducible to rational propositions.2 This perspective dates to William

Bending the Law

“…4 Of interest to us is the geometry that this search model produces. 5 In particular, this kind of Markov-based search produces a metric on the network space that we call PageDist. We call the induced geometry an exploration geometry.…”

“…The acute problems of identifying relevant legal sources (i.e., legal precedent) presented by the common law tradition has spurred codification and classification efforts that have ranged from Blackstone's "Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69)" to the codification movement in the late nineteenth century [1], to the development and spread of the West American Digest System in the twentieth century [2]. Most recently, the effect of digitization on the evolution of the law, primarily in its impact on legal research, has become a subject of inquiry (see e.g., [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]).…”

“…Therein, "directions" function as "points at infinity", producing a hyperbolic metric on the network. For this -and any text corpus -the pure topics provide an obvious choice of direction 5. We are indebted to Peter Doyle for early conversations regarding the geometrization of Markov chains and PageDist 6.…”

Mapping the Achieved Values of Legal Reference Books onto the Digital Future

“…12 It is not necessary to go so far in arguing for its significance, however. Whether or not the West system created 13 (or bounded) 14 legal thoughts via its taxonomy, the strength and breadth of its system created a map of case law research that previously did not exist. 15 The headnote and key number system of the West digest developed alongside its reporter system.…”

Bending the law: geometric tools for quantifying influence in the multinetwork of legal opinions

“…The acute problems of identifying relevant legal sources (i.e., legal precedent) presented by the common law tradition has spurred codification and classification efforts that have ranged from Blackstone's ''Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769)'' to the codification movement in the late nineteenth century (Garoupa and Morriss 2012), to the development and spread of the West American Digest System in the twentieth century (West 1909). Most recently, the effect of digitization on the evolution of the law, primarily in its impact on legal research, has become a subject of inquiry (see e.g., Berring 1986Berring , 1987Fronk 2010;Hanson and Allan 2002;Hellyer 2005;Katsh 1993;McGinnis and Wasick 2015;Schauer and Wise 2000).…”