Social Architecture, Judicial Peer Effects and the Evolution of the Law: Toward a Positive Theory of Judicial Social Structure

Building upon the themes of this symposium, as well as a growing extant literature demonstrating the common law displays properties of a complex system, we believe existing theories of judicial decision-making and legal change would benefit from the concepts and techniques typically reserved for the study of complexity. Among possible approaches, network analysis offers one manner of representing the interactions between various entities across a complex system. Specifically, as applied to the path of the common law as well as theories of judicial decision-making, the networks paradigm helps evaluate the manner in which individual level judge choice maps to the judiciary\u27s aggregate doctrinal outputs. Of course, to the extent individual decision-making is driven by factors entirely intrinsic to a given case and a given jurist, the study of interactions is arguably trivial as the description of aggregate would reflect little more than the summation of individual preferences in a manner consistent with the institution\u27s aggregation rule. It is far more likely, however, that judicial choice is, at least in part, impacted by a combination of jurists who are socially prominent and socially proximate. While in some forms of network structure such peer effects are limited, in many states of the social world, they are supremely consequential. The precursor to evaluating potential doctrinal consequences is a classificatory effort designed to determine the micro implications of a given observed macro landscape. Section I provides a brief overview of complexity theory while simultaneously reviewing existing theories of judicial decision-making and legal change. Section II considers a series of classic network structures. Among the possibilities considered herein are random graphs, clustered graphs, as well models built upon processes of preferential attachment. Drawing from the larger complexity literature, Section II also describes the processes of self-organization likely responsible for generating each of these network structures. With an understanding of these possible states of the world in mind, Section III concludes with a consideration of judicial decision making, arguing the path of the law - from emergence to convergence - is conditioned, in part, upon the nature of self-organized social architecture that relevant decisional actors confront. In all, we believe architecture matters. Thus, our broad sweep of the possibility frontier should help identify the conditions under which network effects are present in the development of the common law

Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate

Article published in the Journal of Legal Education

Proceedings of the OHBM Brainhack 2021

The global pandemic presented new challenges and op-portunities for organizing conferences, and OHBM 2021was no exception. The OHBM Brainhack is an event thatoccurs just prior to the OHBM meeting, typically in-per-son, where scientists of all levels of expertise and interestgather to work and learn together for a few days in a col-laborative hacking-style environment on projects of com-mon interest (1). Building off the success of the OHBM2020 Hackathon (2), the 2021 Open Science SpecialInterest Group came together online to organize a largecoordinated Brainhack event that would take place overthe course of 4 days. The OHBM 2021 Brainhack eventwas organized along two guiding principles, providinga highly inclusive collaborative environment for inter-action between scientists across disciplines and levelsof expertise to push forward important projects thatneed support, also known as the “Hack-Track” of theBrainhack. The second aim of the OHBM Brainhack is toempower scientists to improve the quality of their sci-entific endeavors by providing high-quality hands-ontraining on best practices in open-science approaches.This is best exemplified by the training events providedby the “Train-Track” at the OHBM 2021 Brainhack. Here,we briefly explain both of these elements of the OHBM2021 Brainhack, before continuing on to the Brainhackproceedings