Research

This project combines expertise in legislative drafting and legal data science to conduct an automated semantic analysis of more than 2700 Canadian federal regulations. It investigates four legal characteristics of regulations: (1) Prescriptivity, (2)Flexibility, (3) Complexity, and (4) Age.

The number of international trade agreements has dramatically increased since the early 1990s. These agreements cover ever more issues and an average agreement text is now around ten times longer than 25 years ago. This makes it more and more difficult to analyze the content of trade agreements and assess their impact on international trade and welfare. Big data and text-as-data methods can help researchers, policy-makers and other stakeholders to better manage the growing complexity of trade agreements. The Text of Trade Agreements (ToTA) database provides a digital infrastructure for the computational analysis of international trade law. It contains 449 full texts of trade agreements in XML format.