LawtoData: An App for Automating Empirical Legal Research
LawtoData: An App for Automating Empirical Legal Research
17 March 2025 (Monday), 2:30-3:30 PM
Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, HKU
Empirical legal research often involves learning from a large number of judgments, legislative materials, or other textual data. For example, empirical projects in law and an area of social science use large data sets to learn about human behaviour and social phenomena in the legal sphere. Legal historians also sometimes investigate how hundreds or thousands of cases fitting some description have developed over several centuries. While empirical legal research has successfully yielded valuable insights across jurisdictions and subject matters, it remains rare in Commonwealth jurisdictions. This is partially because empirical projects tend to be time-consuming and expensive to undertake.
Enter LawtoData: an app developed to reduce the cost of doing empirical legal research, using judgments as a test case. This app seeks to make empirical research viable without a large budget and an army of research assistants. It is open source and free to use.
LawtoData automates judgment data collection, coding and cleaning. That is, this app can:
(1) Search for and collect judgments of select Australian, UK and US courts; and
(2) Extract and code your choice of data or information from judgments, partially using GPT.
You will obtain a spreadsheet with rows of judgments and columns of judgment-specific descriptions/features, such as catchwords/keywords, hearing dates, decisions, decision dates and whatever else you wish to collect from each judgment.
A pilot version of the app is available at https://lawtodata.streamlit.app/
About the Speaker
Ben Chen is Associate Professor at the University of Sydney Law School. He is a law and economics scholar writing in the areas of equity and trusts, civil procedure, succession law, and game theory. His publications include full-length original articles in Cornell Law Review, Economic Theory, Melbourne University Law Review, and Modern Law Review. His sole-authored, practitioner-oriented articles have been cited extra-judicially by judges of the New South Wales and Queensland Courts of Appeal. The Australian Research Council has awarded him a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) and a Discovery Project (DP) grant.
Chair: Professor Say Goo, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
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Enquiries: Flora Leung at aiiflhku@hku.hk