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The digitization of legal texts and advances in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, text mining, network analysis, and machine learning have led to new forms of legal analysis by lawyers and law scholars. This article provides an overview of how computational methods are affecting research across the varied landscape of legal scholarship, from the interpretation of legal texts to the quantitative estimation of causal factors that shape the law. As computational tools continue to penetrate legal scholarship, they allow scholars to gain traction on traditional research questions and may engender entirely new research programs. Already, computational methods have facilitated important contributions in a diverse array of law-related research areas. As these tools continue to advance, and law scholars become more familiar with their potential applications, the impact of computational methods is likely to continue to grow. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 16 is October 13, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

This article investigates the relationship between the political preferences of E.U. Member States and the behavior of judges at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) by analyzing their citation behavior. It shows that judges at the ECJ are more likely to cite judgments authored by judges appointed by Member State governments with similar preferences regarding European integration. Analogous with the context of U.S. courts, nonrandom opinion assignment potentially threatens the validity of these results. To overcome this problem, I exploit the unique institutional setting at the ECJ to develop an improved identification strategy that builds on comparing the citations in two documents produced in the same case (i.e., the judgment and the opinion of the Advocate General). The findings in this article provide evidence for the hypothesis that the political preferences of Member State governments are reflected in the behavior of the members of the ECJ.

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