Lexalyze - Interdisciplinary Research Program

White Paper on LEXIA Prototype

Motivation

Interestingly, the sphere of law and jurisprudence has been rather skeptical of the digital revolution. While legal science has established legal informatics as a field of research and even if there have been attempts to undertake projects in legal science by employing the means of informatics, the digital revolution has had very little impact on legislation, jurisprudence and contract design. Digital applications only serve as helpful instruments – legal search engines being the most obvious example –, not as transformative agents.

Potential of Undetected Synergies

The tools of informatics seem to be highly suited to dealing with issues that arise in the course of legal affairs: The legal system consists of and is confronted with large bodies of complex data that follow rational and objective principles (at least in an ideal world). As far as the legal system itself is concerned, one cannot help the impression that there is a hopeless amount of overregulation; a lot of times, an excessive number of legal norms seem to do nothing but create redundancies and inefficacies. Informatics, on the other hand, is a science that promises to help solve this problem as it has brought about new insights on how to effectively organize und use complex data. Algorithms with excellent precision can perform tasks that involve a lot of data without much effort; in former times, comparable tasks could only be fulfilled by employing knowledgeable people for a long time.

Problem Statement

The increasing complexity of legal systems, respectively texts, has many origins, which are worth a deeper analysis (Katz, 2013; Schuck, 1992). This project is an attempt to unveil the complexity in legal texts driven by structural, lexical and syntactical properties. Thereby we use established quantitative methods from structural network analysis and linguistics into the domain of legal text analysis. Those methods will provide quantitative measurements in order to objectively measure and compare different texts as well as their evolution in time. Therefore, this project aims in a first step, to provide a set of metrics, enabling a structured and objective comparison of legal texts regarding their complexity and understandability.

Evolution: 25 years of the Corporation Stock Act (AktG)

Interdisciplinarity and Call for Participation

Since the problems addressed in this project cover a broad spectrum of research areas, the interdisciplinary research group consists of computer scientists, legal scientists, lawyers, and philosophers.

The Lexalyze project follows a dynamical progression and is open to cooperations with suitable partners from academia and industry. There are possibilities of performing a doctoral research (PhD) in connection with the project Lexalyze.

Research Activities