Daniel Martin Katz (Michigan State University – College of Law), Michael James Bommarito II (University of Michigan, Department of Financial Engineering; University of Michigan, Department of Political Science; University of Michigan, Center for the Study of Complex Systems), Julie Seaman (Emory University School of Law), Adam Candeub (Michigan State University College of Law), & Eugene Agichtein have posted Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the ‘Evolution’ of Legal Language (Proceedings of JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Vienna 2011)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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In this paper, we highlight the potential of n-grams as a vehicle to explore the ‘evolution’ of the law and legal language. Using the full text corpus of decisions of the United States Supreme Court (1791-2005), we explore the n-gram space, offer some initial results based upon our calculations and highlight the beta version of our n-gram search interface.
And here is the Legal Language Explorer described in the paper.