Abstract : Computational legal studies uses tools from artificial intelligence, natural language processing, network analysis, and machine learning to study the law and legal institutions. Digital access to large corpora of legal documents, including judicial opinions, legislation, and administrative materials, creates opportunities to study legal developments at scale, substantially expanding the methodological approaches available to legal scholars. Over the past two decades, computational tools have also become substantially more powerfully, and traditional approaches such as sentiment analysis and topic modeling have been joined by newer methods based on transformer models and generative AI. This work provides new ways to study traditional questions in empirical legal studies and also opens the possibilities for new research avenues to better understand the law and its relationship to society.
