Abstract
Over the years, computation has become a fundamental part of the scientific practice in several research fields that goes far beyond the boundaries of natural sciences. Data mining, machine learning, simulations and other computational methods lie today at the hearth of the scientific endeavour in a growing number of social research areas from anthropology to economics. In this scenario, an increasingly important role is played by analytical platforms: integrated environments allowing researchers to experiment cutting-edge data-driven and computation-intensive analyses. The paper discusses the appearance of such tools in the emerging field of computational legal science. After a general introduction to the impact of computational methods on both natural and social sciences, we describe the concept and the features of an analytical platform exploring innovative cross-methodological approaches to the academic and investigative study of crime. Stemming from an ongoing project involving researchers from law, computer science and bioinformatics, the initiative is presented and discussed as an opportunity to raise a debate about the future of legal scholarship and, inside of it, about the challenges of computational legal science.
Highlights
The history of science has always been marked by a close connection between the development of new research tools and the understanding of reality
The call for a closer integration of empirical analyses into legal scholarship and practice characterising Empirical legal studies (ELS)—the latest in a series of empirically flavoured schools of thought going from Law and Economics, to Sociology of law and Legal Realism—inevitably results into the quest for tools enabling a deeper understanding of the factual dimension of the legal universe [1,10,11,12]
The tool allows the combination of several techniques, i.e., data mining, Social Network Analysis (SNA), and data visualisation, to gain a deeper understanding of structural and functional features of criminal organisations starting from the analysis of even simple relational and investigative data
Summary
The history of science has always been marked by a close connection between the development of new research tools and the understanding of reality. The design of new scientific tools for various reasons is looming on the horizon within today’s debate about the aims and methods of legal studies. Empirical legal studies (ELS) [1,2,3,4] and Computational legal science (CLS) [5,6,7,8,9], are pushing forward discussions involving scientific issues such as the definition of scope and object of legal science, and methodological questions concerning how and with which instruments law can be studied. We aim at raising the debate about the new frontier of computational legal studies, a still poorly explored research field that will probably make important contributions to legal theory and practice in coming years.
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