Similarity Measure among Structures of Local Government Statute Books based on Tree Edit Distance

A similarity measure between statute books of local governments that can help reveal suggestive similarities is proposed. The regulations of a local government are stored in a statute book, and they are categorized in a layered structure. The layered structure can be described as an ordered tree in computer science, and we define the similarity of statute books as the tree edit distance between two trees. We have calculated the similarities among statute books of the 47 Japanese prefectures and plotted them on a plane using multi-dimensional scaling. The results visually indicate the relationships of similarities among them, and there are several outlier prefectures and clusters. This will help find local governments with similar regulations, which will facilitate the writing or revision of statutes, especially in small local governments, which are typically short staffed

Measuring Law Over Time: A Network Analytical Framework with an Application to Statutes and Regulations in the United States and Germany

How do complex social systems evolve in the modern world? This question lies at the heart of social physics, and network analysis has proven critical in providing answers to it. In recent years, network analysis has also been used to gain a quantitative understanding of law as a complex adaptive system, but most research has focused on legal documents of a single type, and there exists no unified framework for quantitative legal document analysis using network analytical tools. Against this background, we present a comprehensive framework for analyzing legal documents as multi-dimensional, dynamic document networks. We demonstrate the utility of this framework by applying it to an original dataset of statutes and regulations from two different countries, the United States and Germany, spanning more than twenty years (1998-2019). Our framework provides tools for assessing the size and connectivity of the legal system as viewed through the lens of specific document collections as well as for tracking the evolution of individual legal documents over time. Implementing the framework for our dataset, we find that at the federal level, the United States legal system is increasingly dominated by regulations, whereas the German legal system remains governed by statutes. This holds regardless of whether we measure the systems at the macro, the meso, or the micro level.Comment: 32 pages, 13 figures (main paper); 32 pages, 14 figures (supplementary information

Measuring Clarity in Legal Text

Legal cases often turn on judgments of textual clarity: when the text is unclear, judges allow extrinsic evidence in contract disputes, consult legislative history in statutory interpretation, and more. Despite this, almost no empirical work considers the nature or prevalence of legal clarity. Scholars and judges who study real-world documents to inform the interpretation of legal text primarily treat unclear text as a research problem to be solved with more data rather than a fundamental feature of language. This Article makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to the legal concept of textual clarity. It first advances a theory of clarity that distinguishes between information and determinacy. A judge might find text unclear because she personally lacks sufficient information to decide which interpretation is best; alternatively, she might find it unclear because the text itself is fundamentally indeterminate. Fundamental linguistic indeterminacy explains ongoing interpretive debates and limits the potential for text-focused methods (including corpus linguistics) to decide cases. With this theoretical background, the Article then proposes a new method to algorithmically evaluate textual clarity. Applying techniques from natural language processing and artificial intelligence that measure the semantic similarity between words, we can shed valuable new light on questions of legal interpretation. This Article finds that text is frequently indeterminate in real-world legal cases. Moreover, estimates of similarity vary substantially from corpus to corpus, even for large and reputable corpora. This suggests that word use is highly corpus-specific and that meaning can vary even between general-purpose corpora that theoretically capture ordinary meaning. These empirical findings have important implications for ongoing doctrinal debates, suggesting that text is less clear and objective than many textualists believe. Ultimately, the Article offers new insights both to theorists considering the role of legal text and to empiricists seeking to understand how text is used in the real world

Childhood and the law.

Minority and infancy are technical legal terms signifying legal subjects and statuses which are non-adult, less than 'full' legal persons because they are below the age of minority. How the law creates and sustains differences between the category adult and non-adult, between adulthood and childhood, how age divisions are made concrete and socially significant through the differential distribution of legal rights, protections, capacities and disabilities, provides the focal point of this work. Drawing on recent theories of ideology, subjectivity and discourse analysis, we explore how the law, in defining subjects capable of participating in the law-making process, responsible enough to be governed by its rules, and with the attributes to initiate legal actions, can also, by a process of exclusion, constitute the subjectivity of 'the child'. The age lines bounding the child from the adult are arbitrary and historically transitory, they also apply differentially across genders. They are extremely useful because they tell us a great deal about the legal assumptions made about the rationality, responsibility and competence of children. When we begin to link age lines, with cognition/competence and legal capacity/disability across different branches of the law, we are offered a variety of definitions as to what is to count as adult and minor. The differing ages at which certain rights, obligations and responsibilities may be assumed provides us with the means of identifying the particular social relations and interests which each branch of the law privileges and preserves. To this end, we explore in turn; the legal conception of infancy and minority, conceptions of consent and discretion and the effect of the age of majority; the system of inheritance as a process by which family statuses (crucially adults and minors) are preserved and reproduced over time; the social relations guardianship and parenthood and family membership and how these have become an intimate concern of the judiciary and the state; finally, the process by which children were made no longer subject to the full sanctions of the criminal law. These aspects of inter-generational relations are discussed within the context of the English legal system

Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture, Volume 8

The present dissertation deals with the artistic collaboration of a married couple, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald. Living in Glasgow at the turn of the century, theeå, Swedeny concentrated their work on interior design. However, artistic collaboration has been neglected by traditional art history, with its concentration on individual creativity. For the couple in question, this has meant that the work they created together has been mainly attributed to Mackintosh, thereby relegating Mac­donald to the role of spouse and assistant, rather than co-creator. The present disser­tation presents a different picture of the couple's collaboration, challenging and revi­sing our cultural perceptions about the creative abilities of the respective sexes. A selection of interiors created by the Mackintoshes is studied in order to shed light on their collaborative efforts. The analyses embark from the perspectives of «masculine» and «feminine» in order to show how the Mackintoshes created artistic wholeness in their interiors, while at the same time opening up the spaces for a mixture of actors, i.e. making the rooms accessible to men and women alike through their designs. During this epoch, the concepts of «masculine» and «feminine» were employed as natural points of reference in an attempt to explain social and cultural phenomena scientifically. The Mackintoshes made use of the era's conventions when creating interiors in the accepted division of masculine (hallways, dining rooms, libraries) and feminine (bedrooms, salons) spaces. However, with time they began to combine these accepted gender forms in order to create something new and modern. Just as the Mackintoshes could create more powerful works of art by combining their respective artistic talents, their spaces could accrue greater significance through the combination of masculine and feminine principles.digitalisering@um

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

Peace made, peace built?: Participation, countryside, and politics in the 2010s Colombian peace process

This thesis argues that the pursuit of participation and inclusion of all the society and inform well the citizenry about the terms of the accord is vital to achieving peacemaking on the one hand; and, a rural restructure, changing political parties’ informal coercive institutions and shifting the social norm of war towards peacebuilding on the other, are crucial coordinates so as to a routing a genuine development for Colombia. A nation that during the 2010s faced the challenge to end its long-standing civil war between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia − People's Army (FARC-EP) rebels. I advance the argument in two parts: first, peacemaking is divided in two chapters. One examines participation and inclusion in the 2016 peace settlement based on democratic innovation and the ladder of citizen participation, arguing in a constructivist way, and applying hermeneutics that inclusion does not necessarily mean a civil society's control over the peacemaking process, being the participation of the political society and insurgency a precondition. The second chapter of this section focuses on the 2016 peace plebiscite, conceptually argues that personal, relational, cultural, and structural causes are intimately related to voters’ attitudes. And quantitatively discloses from municipal data that spaces with rural poverty, coca crops, victims, remote from the centre and an intense presence of the rebels had positive associations with the yes vote, a heterogeneous influence of the warring parties, and that the vote for no won at higher population and high abstention. The second part of this thesis addresses peacebuilding through three chapters. The first, argues that civil war has been encouraged by the grievance to reduce rural poverty, so, based upon Latin American Structuralism and original data empirically finds a paradox of land redistribution, intense positive effects of technical progress to defeat rural poverty, a dependency that undermines the better rural standard of living, ditches that become greater between centre-periphery, and the egregious effects of forced displacement for the countryside. The second chapter of this section examines the brutality, narcotics trafficking, and corruption enforced by active Colombian political parties (19 parties and one social movement) from 2011 to 2020. To do so, I addressed historical contingencies of the party politics and build a novel panel data set where the brutality composite indicator, the corruption indicator and coca crops are response variables for the explanatory matrix of political parties elected to executive branch positions. The findings unmask political parties who enforced or rejected these three coercive and violent informal institutions beside divergent causes. Lastly, in chapter five, the third part of section two, posits eight individual political preferences (kinship, funding, perpetuation, ideology, decision-making, religion, military, and media) that cement the norm of civil war. Hence, I carry out an experiment with all members of the 2018- vi 2022 Colombian Congress cohort (102 subjects in the Senate and 170 in the House of Representatives). The results indicate that the population is dominated by a selfish adapted community with heterogeneous preferences according to subjects’ chamber or the experimental groups (i.e., self-enforcers, dodgers, and scofflaws).A tese argumenta que a procura da participação e inclusão da sociedade, e informar bem à cidadania sobre os termos do acordo é vital para a formulação da paz, por um lado; e a reestruturação rural, mudar as instituições informais coercitivas dos partidos políticos, e virar a norma social da guerra orientando-a à construção de paz, de outro lado, são coordenadas cruciais para o roteamento de um desenvolvimento genuíno para Colômbia. Uma nação que durante a década dos 2010 defrontou o desafio de concluir sua guerra civil de longa duração entre o governo e a guerrilha das Forças Armadas Revolucionarias da Colômbia – Exército do Povo (FARC-EP). Levo a cabo o argumento em duas partes: A primeira, pacificação, é dividida em dois capítulos. Um examina a participação e inclusão no acordo de paz de 2016 baseado na inovação democrática e a escada da participação cidadã, a discutir de uma forma construtivista e aplicando hermenêutica que a inclusão não necessariamente significa um controle da sociedade civil no processo de pacificação, sendo a participação da sociedade política e da insurgência uma precondição. O segundo capítulo desta secção foca-se no plebiscito de paz de 2016, conceitualmente trata que causas pessoais, relacionais, culturais e estruturais estão intimamente conexas com as atitudes dos votantes. E quantitativamente revela a partir de data municipal que espaços com pobreza rural, culturas de coca, vítimas, distantes do centro e com uma intensa presença de rebeldes têm associações positivas com o voto sim, uma influência heterogênea das partes em conflito, e que o voto pelo não ganhou em lugares de alta densidade demográfica e de elevada abstenção. A segunda parte da tese aborda a construção de paz mediante três capítulos, por tanto, o primeiro fundamentado no estruturalismo latino-americano e data original, empiricamente descobre um paradoxo na distribuição da terra, efeitos positivamente intensos do progresso técnico a fim de vencer à pobreza rural, uma dependência que abate um melhor standard de vida no campo, fossos que se engrandecem entre o centro e a periferia, e os atrozes efeitos do deslocamento forçado para o campo. O segundo capítulo da segunda parte examina a brutalidade, o narcotráfico, e corrupção reforçada pelos partidos políticos colombianos ativos (19 partidos e um movimento social) de 2011 até 2020, para fazê lo, abordei contingências históricas da política partidária e construo um conjunto de dados painel onde o indicador composto de brutalidade, o indicador de corrupção e as culturas de coca são variáveis de resposta para a matriz de partidos políticos eleitos em cargos do ramo executivo. As descobertas desmascaram partidos políticos que reforçam ou rejeitam essas três viii instituições informais coercitivas e violentas além de causas divergentes. Por fim, no capítulo cinco, a terceira secção da parte dois da tese, postula oito preferências políticas individuais (parentesco, financiamento, perpetuamento, ideologia, tomada de decisões, religião, militares e média) que cimentam a norma de guerra civil. Assim sendo, levo a cabo um experimento com todos os integrantes do Congresso de Colômbia da coorte 2018-2022 (102 sujeitos no Senado e 170 na Câmara de Representantes). Os resultados indicam que a população é dominada por uma comunidade egoísta adaptada com preferências heterogêneas segundo à câmara e grupo experimental (i.e., auto executores, trapaceiros, e burla leis) dos sujeitos