Traditional comparative legal research has long provided valuable insights into how laws differ across jurisdictions. Scientific legal mapping builds on these practices, introducing transparency and reproducibility that expand their utility for empirical research, policymaking, and public engagement.
In this Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics commentary, Scott Burris highlights the methodological shift represented by scientific legal mapping and the advantages it offers for scholars, advocates, and social scientists.
The paper identifies three core contributions of scientific legal mapping:
Enhancing efficiency and consistency for legal scholars through structured coding and documentation;
Making comparative research more accessible to policymakers, advocates, and the public by turning legal texts into digitized, visualized data; and
Improving the rigor of evaluation studies in social science by providing transparent, replicable datasets on law.
Read the paper
Authors:
Scott Burris, JD, Center for Public Health Law Research, Beasley School of Law, Temple University