Topic models are statistical models that detect themes in text corpora. They can be used in information retrieval to find documents that are "similar" to a query, based on the similarity of the themes in the query to the documents in the retrieval database. Applying such models to the domain of legal research might help in improving the efficacy and accuracy of legal research and writing proces...

The legal case base contains thousands of cases, all represented as text. In the last forty years or so, the corpora of cases have been digitally represented, enabling digital searches. With new technologies come new opportunities. For the case base, this was the opportunity to search quickly and efficiently through the cases for particular information, facilitating the identification of releva...

Appellate courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multimember, or collegial, courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a “case-...