The Anatomy of Legal Argumentation: Harnessing Higher-Order Networks to Trace the Development of Doctrine
Modeling collections of historical documents as temporal citation networks allows us to study a wide range of dynamic phenomena, such as the diffusion of ideas or the formation of concepts.
However, if the documents in question cover multiple topics and exhibit rich internal structure, the traditional modeling of documents as nodes and citations as directed edges discards too much relevant context to obtain nuanced insights.
In this talk, I propose to address this challenge by modeling documents as nodes and sequences of hyperedges in self-referential, doubly temporal hypergraphs.
I introduce simple methods to study the resulting network representations and demonstrate the utility of the suggested tools on a corpus of judicial decisions from the German Federal Constitutional Court spanning more than seventy years (1951–2022).
Speaker Bio
Corinna (they/she) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University, where they lead the Telos Lab conducting research in the intersection of law, computer science, and complex systems. They are also a Fellow at the Bucerius Center for Legal Technology and Data Science, a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and a Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance. Before joining Aalto University, they spent ten months as a Digital Futures Postdoctoral Fellow at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Stockholm Resilience Center.
Corinna studied law at Bucerius Law School and Stanford Law School, completing their First State Exam in Hamburg in 2015. They obtained a PhD in law (Dr. iur., summa cum laude) from Bucerius Law School and a BSc in computer science from LMU Munich, both in 2018, as well as an MSc in computer science in 2020 and a PhD in computer science (Dr. rer. nat., summa cum laude) in 2023, both from Saarland University. Their legal dissertation was awarded the Bucerius Dissertation Award in 2018 and the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society in 2020, and their interdisciplinary research profile was recognized by the Caroline von Humboldt Prize for outstanding female junior scientists in 2022.