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Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

I think visualizing it like this is very strange. I am not a legal expert but I have read a lot of law textbooks.

Normally, I’d expect blackletter law to form a somewhat sparse, tentacle-like structure.

Case law (or “cases” or “jurisprudence”) is by its nature largely interstitial: it consists of judges “filling in the holes” that are left by any unclear meaning (requiring interpretation) of blackletter law, or in some cases by the absence of such.

Having case law and blackletter law form two distinct clusters makes no sense to me: I really think it’s a domain modelling error. It’s what I would expect to see if one applied a text similarity measure naively to some data set, without regard for the domain models.

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As I note in my article, the language and style employed in Australian judgments is different from that employed in statute. Furthermore, in common law countries like Australia, you have many legal concepts that have developed independently of statute and either remain independent or have been formalised into statute (see, eg, torts: https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/traditional-rights-and-f...).

I understand that, but there is a difference between text similarity and semantic similarity. You claim to have performed semantic clustering, but what I am seeing, and what you are saying in your response to my comment, has less to do with semantics and more to do with superficial textual encodings.

Case law and blackletter law will obviously look very different in terms of their textual representation, style, formatting, etc... And this will be true even when they pertain to the same ideas and the same concepts.

To state the obvious, semantics is about the meaning of things, not about style and not about specific word choices or specific syntactical forms (although sometimes these carry meaning as well).

> Furthermore, in common law countries like Australia, you have many legal concepts that have developed independently of statute and either remain independent or have been formalised into statute.

This is the bigger point. In my own university studies, there was a clear segmentation between the common law and statute, although they are certainly interrelated.

It’s also worth noting that the boundaries between cases and legislation were not absolute, there were areas of the cases ‘mainland’ that contained legislation.

My point on the style was that in addition to differences in purposes, they are also textually different, which can indeed bleed into semantics.

The point is not lost on me. Certainly tort law, contract law, administrative law, and many other areas of law aren't usually sourced from blackletter law as much as from jurisprudence or other sources of law.

I think this very point you're trying to make would be more persuasive if the analysis had modelled the relationships that do exist between blackletter law and case law. As we have already discussed, text similarity may not suffice to reveal these relationships. And while these relationships don't always exist, when they do exist they are very strong.

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