American legal history through computational methods. Law and legal practice modernized in the nineteenth-century United States. We are studying and visualizing the history of the modernization of American law.
Please see our project website for a full explanation of the project, as well as a list of the scholarship we have produced. Here is the citation for the project as a whole:
Kellen Funk and Lincoln Mullen, Legal Modernism, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (2022–): https://doi.org/10.31835/legalmodernism.
This repository contains all of the code for the project. Below are descriptions of the main parts of this repository. (Note that some of these repositories exist on feature branches not yet merged into the main branch.)
notebooks/: A directory of analytical notebooks.
These programs run the various data creation tasks for the project.
adj2edge/: Convert a network adjacency list to a network edge list.cap-import: Import data from the Caselaw Access Project.cite-detector-moml/: Detect citations in the Making of Modern Law treatises.cite-predictor/: Augment citation detection using generative AI.cite-linker/: Link detected citations to a database of English and American caselaw.lm-diagnostic/: Run various diagnostic checks on the high-performance cluster.chambers/: An internal-only web app for understanding our data
db/: Migrations, queries, and other information about our PostgreSQL database.doi/: Records for the DOIs created for the project outputs.go/: Go packages for the various programs in the repository.scripts/: One-off scripts for data manipulation and import.slurm/: Slurm batch job scripts for running programs on the HPC cluster.test-data/: Sample data for development and testing.website/: Source code for our website, generated by Hugo.
LAW_DBSTR: Most of the programs in this repository expect a PostgreSQL connection string in the formpostgresql://user:password@host:5432/database?connect_timeout=15&pool_max_conns=8. IfLAW_DBSTRis not set, the connection string is assembled from the individual variables below.LAW_DB_NAME: Database name (required ifLAW_DBSTRis not set).LAW_DB_USER: Database user (required ifLAW_DBSTRis not set).LAW_DB_PASS: Database password (required ifLAW_DBSTRis not set).LAW_DB_HOST: Database host (required ifLAW_DBSTRis not set).LAW_DB_PORT: Database port (optional, defaults to5432).LAW_DB_PARAMS: Query parameters appended to the connection string (optional, e.g.,connect_timeout=15&pool_max_conns=8).LAW_DEBUG: An optional environment variable, which can be set todebugortrueto get more verbose logging output.
The source code and data is available under an open-access license in LICENSE.txt. The prose and findings are © Kellen Funk and Lincoln Mullen, 2022–, with all rights reserved.