Network analysis in law

In the past decade the concept of network has acquired a growingly relevant role in the way we conceptualize, study and measure the world. The computational study of networks in all its declensions has been entering in a variety of fields including social sciences. This volume brings together researchers from computational social science, law and computational legal theory, network science and related disciplines to discuss the actual and potential applications of network analysis in the legal domain. Law is made by people, about and for people and institutions. These people or institutions can be seen as networks, moreover law itself forms networks, sources of law refer to other sources of law and together constitute (part of) the core of the legal system. All these phenomena can be detected, mapped and analysed in order to get deeper insights about their structure, their function and their evolution. The nine contributions collected in the volume deal with these topics offering an up to date overview of the most relevant research strands in this field. Publications in the «Law Science Technology» series will deal, from one point of view, with looking more closely at and revisiting classical topics of Legal Informatics, and from another, at innovative topics arising out of the dialogue between legal science and a range of research areas ranging from cognitive sciences to complexity science, from computer science to computational social science and biological sciences.