What is the dimension of citation space?

© 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.Citation networks represent the flow of information between agents. They are constrained in time and so form directed acyclic graphs which have a causal structure. Here we provide novel quantitative methods to characterise that structure by adapting methods used in the causal set approach to quantum gravity by considering the networks to be embedded in a Minkowski spacetime and measuring its dimension using Myrheim-Meyer and Midpoint-scaling estimates. We illustrate these methods on citation networks from the arXiv, supreme court judgements from the USA, and patents and find that otherwise similar citation networks have measurably different dimensions. We suggest that these differences can be interpreted in terms of the level of diversity or narrowness in citation behaviour

Legal Precedent Mining with Machine Learning

Generally, the present disclosure is directed to gathering legal precedent from a corpus of law. In particular, in some implementations, the systems and methods of the present disclosure can include or otherwise leverage one or more machine-learned models to predict decision data from a court decision based on the court decision (e.g., a textual copy of the court decision)

Understanding the Institutional Evolution of the European Rural Policy: A Methodological Approach

Last decades have seen the development of a new rural policy. Different problems occurring in rural areas have pushed the EU Commission to draft policy instruments aiming to address them. However this rural policy path has not always been explicit neither has followed a continuous trend but rather has seen a series of forward and backward steps. Given the lack of a method to establish the relevance and the level of political acceptance of EU rural policy, a methodology has been developed. This methodology has tried to identify the EU political procedure trend, though this is not a formal sequence, and to establish a classification of different events according to a proposed hierarchy. Several EU documents, decisions, directives and financial resource allocations have been analysed. Within the review performed, each rural policy milestone has been classified following the proposed hierarchical chart. This has enabled the drawing of the different backs and forwards taken by this process. Besides, it has lead to the interpretation of the rural policy instruments current position in relation with other European policy instruments.Rural development, policy analysis, institutional processes, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Inferring Mechanisms for Global Constitutional Progress

Constitutions help define domestic political orders, but are known to be influenced by two international mechanisms: one that reflects global temporal trends in legal development, and another that reflects international network dynamics such as shared colonial history. We introduce the provision space; the growing set of all legal provisions existing in the world's constitutions over time. Through this we uncover a third mechanism influencing constitutional change: hierarchical dependencies between legal provisions, under which the adoption of essential, fundamental provisions precedes more advanced provisions. This third mechanism appears to play an especially important role in the emergence of new political rights, and may therefore provide a useful roadmap for advocates of those rights. We further characterise each legal provision in terms of the strength of these mechanisms

The Carbon Tax Vacuum and the Debate about Climate Change Impacts: Emission Taxation of Commodity Crop Production in Food System Regulation

The scientific consensus on climate change is far ahead of U.S. policy on point. In fact, the U.S. has a legal vacuum of carbon taxation while climate change continues to impact the codependence of agriculture and the environment. As this Article shows, carbon taxes follow the polluter-pays model, levying taxes on the highest greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions—and contributions to climate change. But this is not only unsustainable; it would also undermine agricultural production and, thus, food security. This Article describes how the law can regulate climate change contributions and promote adaptation and mitigation supported through carbon taxes in the agricultural sector, twenty percent of GHG contributions will be left untouched, jeopardizing the future of U.S. food production at the environment’s expense. This Article reveals new avenues of climate change adaptation and mitigation through carbon taxation of genetically modified (“GMO”) commodity crops to bring the carbon tax to a previously overlooked contributor to climate change: intensive agriculture. However, adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change, such as extreme weather events, droughts, and floods, can only be accomplished through concerted efforts of various industries, governments, and the public like cap-and-trade or carbon tax schemes imposing blanket limits on GHG emissions

Building institutions for growth and human developement : an economic perspective applied to transitional countries of Europe and CIS

The collapse of the communist system during the late 1980’s redefined the hierarchy among Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) and the former USSR. Some of these countries joined the EU ; some did not ; others formed the CIS . In particular, institutions, mainly market and political one, appear to be a strong foundation for a rapid but irreversible shift from socialism to market-oriented economy. The relationship between economic performance and the quality of domestic institutions has emerged recently as a major subject of interest. The literature shows that the higher the quality of domestic institutions the better the effects on the Human development and growth of a country. The aim of this paper is to analyse in a more qualitative way the role of institutions in transitional countries in the CEECs and CIS. The main question we address is: what kind of institutional arrangement leads to Human development? We propose an analytical pattern where global performance (i.e. Human development) is the final outcome of a new institutional arrangement

A Global Community of Courts? Modelling the Use of Persuasive Authority as a Complex Network

There is a growing discussion in the legal literature of an emerging global community of courts composed of a network of increasing judicial dialogue across national borders. We investigate the use of foreign persuasive authority in common law countries by analyzing the network of citations to case law in a corpus of over 1.5 million judgments given by the senior courts of twenty-six common law countries. Our corpus of judgments is derived from data available in the vLex Justis database. In this paper we aim to quantify the flow of jurisprudence across the countries in our corpus and to explore the factors that may influence a judge’s selection of foreign jurisprudence. Utilization of foreign case law varies across the countries in our data, with the courts of some countries presenting higher engagement with foreign jurisprudence than others. Our analysis shows that there has been an upward trend in the use of foreign case law over time, with a marked increase in citations across national borders from the 1990s onward, potentially indicating that increased digital access to foreign judgments has served to facilitate and promote comparative analysis. Not only has the use of foreign case law generally increased over time, the factors that may influence the selection of case law have also evolved, with judges gradually casting their research beyond the most influential and well-known foreign authorities. Notwithstanding that judgments emanating from the United Kingdom (chiefly from the courts of England and Wales) constitute the most frequently consulted body of jurisprudence, we find evidence that domestic courts favor citing the case law of countries that are geographically proximal

Delaware Public Benefit Corporations 90 Days Out: Who\u27s Opting In?

The Delaware legislature recently shocked the sustainable business and social enterprise sector. On August 1, 2013, amendments to the Delaware General Corporation Law became effective, allowing entities to incorporate as a public benefit corporation, a new hybrid corporate form that requires managers to balance shareholders’ financial interests with the besat interests of stakeholders materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and produce a public benefit. For a state that has long ruled U.S. corporate law and whose judiciary has frequently invoked shareholder primacy, the adoption of the public benefit corporation form has been hailed as a victory by sustainable business and social enterprise proponents. And yet, the significance of this victory in Delaware is premature. Information about the number and types of companies opting into the public benefit corporation form has been preliminary and speculative. This article fills that gap. In this article, I present original descriptive research on the 53 public benefit corporations that incorporated or converted in Delaware within the first three months of the amended corporate statute’s effectiveness. Based on publicly available documents and information, I analyze these first public benefit corporations with respect to the following characteristics: (1) year of incorporation as a proxy for corporate age, (2) industry, (3) charitable activities, (4) identified specific public benefit, and (5) adoption of model legislation options not required by the Delaware statute. My analysis returns the following results: 75% of public benefit corporations are likely new corporations in their early stages of operation; 32% of public benefit corporations provide professional services (e.g., consulting, legal, financial, architectural design), the technology, healthcare, and education sectors each represent 11% of public benefit corporations, 10% of public benefit corporations produce consumer retail products; approximately 40% of public benefit corporations could have alternatively incorporated as a charitable nonprofit exempt from federal income taxes. This article discusses these and other findings to assist in understanding the public benefit corporation and how it has been employed within the first three months of its adoption

Fiduciary Duties and Equity-Debtholder Conflicts

We use an important legal event as a natural experiment to examine the effect of management fiduciary duties on equity-debt conflicts. A 1991 Delaware bankruptcy ruling changed the nature of corporate directors' fiduciary duties in firms incorporated in that state. This change limited managers' incentives to take actions favoring equity over debt for firms in the vicinity of financial distress. We show that this ruling increased the likelihood of equity issues, increased investment, and reduced firm risk, consistent with a decrease in debt-equity conflicts of interest. The changes are isolated to firms relatively closer to default. The ruling was also followed by an increase in average leverage and a reduction in covenant use. Finally, we estimate the welfare implications of this change and find that firm values increased when the rules were introduced. We conclude that managerial fiduciary duties affect equity-bond holder conflicts in a way that is economically important, has impact on ex ante capital structure choices, and affects welfare.