Measuring the complexity of the law: the United States Code
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Legal language is notoriously complex.
“Legal language is notoriously complex [3–5]”
From GPT-4 passes the bar exam (2024) · cites this paper as [4]
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Katz, D. M., Bommarito, M. J., Gao, S., & Arredondo, P. (2024) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences · doi:10.1098/rsta.2023.0254 · Cited by 420 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Katz, D. M., & Bommarito, M. J.
- Affiliations
- Michigan State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Katz, Daniel Martin
- Venue
- Artificial Intelligence and Law
- Published
- 2014-09-16
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 337-374
- ISSN
- 0924-8463 (ISSN-L)
- 1572-8382
- OpenAlex
- W3124687544
- Semantic Scholar
- c6500ca5a737f23a928cc4e911cca9e19efaeba9
- Cited by
- 117
- References
- 109
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 2
- FWCI
- 32.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Artificial Intelligence and Law (publishedVersion)
- SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Artificial Intelligence in Law
- Social Sciences › Law › Legal Language and Interpretation
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Legal and Constitutional Studies
- Keywords
- legal complexity, United States Code, citation networks, linguistic entropy, knowledge acquisition, legal language, legal system design, complexity measurement
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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