What if you could take every law, regulation and case in Australia and project them onto a two-dimensional map such that their distance from one another was proportional to their similarity in meaning? What would that look like?
Well, it might look something like what you’ll find in my latest article. I took every law, regulation and case in the Open Australian Legal Corpus, the largest open database of Australian law (which, full disclosure, I authored), and used text embedding and dimensionality reduction models to plot them on a two-dimensional map (excluding noisy documents that I was unable to cluster).
My map represents the first semantic map of Australian law.
Some of the most interesting insights I was able to gain from this endeavour are that:
• Australian case law is more of a continuum than a rigidly defined structure;
• Migration, family and substantive criminal law are the most isolated branches of case law on the map;
• Migration, family and substantive criminal law are the most distant branches of case law from legislation on the map;
• Development law is the closest branch of case law to legislation on the map; and
• The map does not reveal any noticeable distinctions between Australian state and federal law, whether it be in style, principles of interpretation or general jurisprudence.
If you’re interested in learning more about what the map can teach us about Australian law or if you’d like to find out how you can create semantic maps of your own, you can read the full article on my blog, which provides a detailed analysis of my map and also covers the finer details of how I built it, with code examples offered along the way.