The Emergence of Computational Legal Studies: An Introduction

Abstract

This volume arrives at an important inflection point in the relationship between law and computation. Technological, scientific, and methodological developments are increasingly allowing computation to provide not just efficiencies in the traditional ways we practice or study the law, but new perspectives on the law and potential paradigmatic shifts in how we think about and understand it. These developments have already been major factors in the recent evolution of many other academic fields, as evidenced for example by the rise of computational social science, computational biology, the digital humanities, and many more emerged and still-emerging subdisciplines. Although law has perhaps lagged somewhat behind its peer disciplines in adopting and adapting computational research methods, that has begun to change in recent years as more-and-more legal scholars have begun applying computational methods in the course of their research. This volume explores this emergence of computational legal studies by presenting a variety of research that is either representative of, or in conversation with, the field.