Quantifying Legal Positivism

There emerged in the early 19th Century an approach to law that attempted to change it from an art to a science by divorcing law from its moral components and focusing solely on what the law said rather than taking into account moralistic issues and extenuating circumstances. In other words, following the letter of the law rather than its spirit.

Practically speaking, this saw a slow shift in focus upon time-tested principles of law and legal reasoning and ushered in an increased exactness required with regards to citing statues and citing cases rather than relying on other well-known sources of law and legal principles such as the Bible, well-known classical texts, or national history.

This project is concerned with training an algorithm to chew through case law and identify legal citations, classify them as citation to statutes, cases etc and measure the frequency of these citations over time.