Analysing EU Treaty-Making and Litigation With Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing

Abstract

We apply network analysis and topic modeling techniques to explore the evolution of the European Union's treaty making activity and the patterns of litigation they have given rise to. Our analysis reveals that, despite the expansion of the bloc's policy remit, its treaty-making activity retains a strong economic focus. Among the many agreements negotiated by EU institutions, the European Economic Agreement, the Ankara Agreement with Turkey and the World Trade Organization Agreement form the largest clusters of litigated cases. EU international agreements are disproportionately litigated in cases pertaining to residence rights and competition law.

A complexity science approach to law and governance

“…Since the pioneering works on legal complexity, the vibrant community of legal scholars and practitioners, complexity scientists and artificial intelligence (AI) experts has steadily grown over the years, leading to a much wider range of topics being investigated with a variety of new tools. To name just a few: the study of legal citation networks [ 26 , 27 ], machine-learning and network analysis of statutes, treaties and court litigation [ 28 , 29 ], stat-mech models of judicial decisions [ 30 , 31 ] and of structural complexity of legal texts [ 32 , 33 ], corruption scandals [ 34 ], as well as the study of legal language and semantics using quantitative models [ 35 ].…”