Socially disruptive periods and topics from information-theoretical analysis of judicial decisions

EPJ Data Science

Regular Article

Lluc Font-Pomarol¹  Marta Sales-Pardo¹  Angelo Piga²  Roger Guimerà³  Rosa Maria Garcia-Teruel⁴  Sergio Nasarre-Aznar⁴ 

[1] Dept. Chemical Engineering, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43007, Tarragona, Catalonia;Dept. Chemical Engineering, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43007, Tarragona, Catalonia;Dept. Private Law, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43003, Tarragona, Catalonia;Dept. Chemical Engineering, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43007, Tarragona, Catalonia;ICREA, 08017, Barcelona, Catalonia;Dept. Private Law, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43003, Tarragona, Catalonia;

关键词: Judicial decisions;    Topic model;    Information theory;   

DOI  :  10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00376-0

 received in 2022-07-01, accepted in 2022-12-20,  发布年份 2022

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Laws and legal decision-making regulate how societies function. Therefore, they evolve and adapt to new social paradigms and reflect changes in culture and social norms, and are a good proxy for the evolution of socially sensitive issues. Here, we use an information-theoretic methodology to quantitatively track trends and shifts in the evolution of large corpora of judicial decisions, and thus to detect periods in which disruptive topics arise. When applied to a large database containing the full text of over 100,000 judicial decisions from Spanish courts, we are able to identify an abrupt change in housing-related decisions around 2016. Because our information-theoretic approach pinpoints the specific content that drives change, we are also able to interpret the results in terms of the role played by legislative changes, landmark decisions, and the influence of social movements.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2023

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