The Law School Network & Legal Network Analysis

Because it was a series of network-related posts that led to my invite to guest-blog here at the FacultyLounge, I thought I’d start things off with another interactive network and a discussion of networks more generally. The network below (click-through the image for an interactive version) is an alternate projection of the law prof twitter network. I’ve taken the law prof follower relations and changed the unit of analysis to the school that each prof teaches at. This shows us an electronic social network of law schools. Schools that are strongly linked in this network have a lot of profs following one another on twitter. The larger a school’s node, the more influential it is (as gauged by twitter followers) in the law prof social media world.

This network shows three distinct communities. I’m not convinced the distinction between the red/blue communities is really very meaningful, but the green community is quite clearly mostly made up of European schools, and we see Canadian schools bridging the Atlantic divide. This shows that while geography probably only matters to a small degree in forming these relationships, national borders appear to be very important.

The natural question to ask of this sort of network is: why? Why would we care about which schools have profs following one another on twitter? My answer is that I don’t particularly. It is interesting I suppose, and clicking around the network can be fun. On some level twitter relationships are probably a rough proxy for inter-institutional relationships, which can speak to knowledge/influence flow and institutional reputation. But really, I’ve made this and other networks to try and spread network awareness to those interested in the law.

Over the past two decades, network analysis has become one of the most influential and important methodologies in both the physical and social sciences. While sociologists and communication scholars had been doing ‘social’ network analysis for decades, many point to the famous Watts & Strogatz Nature paper from 1998 as the seminal paper that marks the beginning of the current network revolution across almost all research disciplines. According to Google Scholar, the Watts & Strogatz paper has received over 25,000 citations from disciplines as varied as physics, biology, sociology and political science. I can think of very few disciplines that haven't, to some extent, embraced network methods. Even the digital humanists have been bringing a network way of looking at things to the humanities.

The adoption of network analytic techniques has been slower in the law and legal studies. There have been some studies examining precedent networks, information networks, and professor and judicial networks. But, while much of this work has been very good, there are huge expanses of unexplored territory and innumerable questions that haven’t been asked, let alone answered.

Networks permeate the law. Many of us work daily with some of the best and oldest citation network datasets in existence. Case citation networks have tremendous potential to help inform what we know about how the law develops and perhaps predict its future development. Statutes can also be analyzed as networks, with internal references linking section & subsection nodes to one another. In fact, all of the textual material that lawyers and legal academics interact with can be analyzed using a variety of textual-network tools.

In addition to the textual and information networks present throughout the law, lawyers and legal scholars are surrounded by social networks. For instance, the teams that litigate cases or do deals are prime candidates for research into team network structure and how it relates to success. There is no shortage of social legal networks as judges, lawyers, and law students organize into networks in much the same way that other social actors do.

For those interested in networks and the questions that network analysis can help us answer, Wikipedia offers quite good overview of a number of topics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis). There are also a number of quality texts. Newman’s Introduction (http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199206650.001.0001/acprof-9780199206650) and Newman & Barabasi’s Structure and Dynamics (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8114.html) are both good places to start. Also, I love talking shop, so feel free to reach out to discuss legal networks.

Comments

[anon]

More navel gazing.

Is twittering important? Can you seriously contend that twittering is a form of meaningful scholarly activity, or that law professors play a meaningful role in the "twitter" universe?

A while back, we were promised, if I recall correctly, an analysis of the content of the tweets. I don't recall that post, but when last I checked, the numbers following law professors were infinitesimal. Not even measurable, really.

Can you include how many emails a professor has received? How about phone calls? Let's rank mentions over cocktails.

All of these metrics might be more meaningful.

[Anon]

How about counts for the number of commections a professor has outside of academia? Students care about that.

[Ryan Whalen]

Anon 1: I'm glad you agree with me that mapping twitter following relations isn't deeply meaningful in this context. However, I disagree with your complete rejection of the value of social media as a source of potential insight about knowledge flow. I think the adoption of altmetric impact measures by many large scientific publishing groups supports the position that social media data can provide meaningful information.

Anon 2: Yes, that's a good point. It would be fairly straight forward to look in more detail at connections outside the field. Perhaps I'll look into it the next time I find time to fetch a batch of census data.

[anon]

Ryan

Well, it is entirely appropriate to use a term that derives from a hashtag to describe a way to describe impact that really has nothing to do with impact.

As usual, the fallacy of the false alternative is at work here. No one said that "social media" are irrelevant to "insight about knowledge flow."

What I did say is that Twitter is a frivolous venue in any scholarly sense, and that law profs are an insignificant part of that universe in any event. In fact, after eliminating one or two profs, the average number of followers of law profs on Twitter is so embarrassingly insignificant that portraying a sort of colorful cloud populated by tiny names doesn't seem to me to be particularly meaningful or relevant. Others may disagree, but I suspect it is those who want to see how they "rank" against others in this activity.

In fact, the twitter of law profs seems, objectively to be of no importance whatsoever to anyone. This is not to say that law profs shouldn't twitter. This is not to say that law prof should be faulted for doing so.

THis is to say that attempting to dress up and rank and scrutinize this mainly unnoticed activity seems to be self aggrandizing navel gazing and not worthy of your talents.

[Mary Dudziak]

Ryan - I look forward to looking more closely at this. In case it's helpful to know - I am not complaining just passing on user info, the graphic seems not to be mobile friendly, at least on my android.

An idea for the future - though this may take too much work - would be to track interdisciplinary networks. I find that twitter is incredibly useful for networking with a much wider range of historians than I was previously in touch with. And it enables historians interested in law to easily follow law blogs or individual scholars.

[Ryan Whalen]

Thanks Mary. Mobile friendliness can be tricky. The network 'should' work on an Android, but if the screen dimensions are on the smaller side it won't work very well.

I agree that cross-discipline relations would be an interesting area to look at.