ABSTRACT
Concepts are said to be the building blocks of law, underlying the rules, standards and principles that comprise legal doctrine. Despite the acknowledged importance of legal concepts, it remains an open question which of all legal concepts are most fundamental to law.
This Article attempts to identify the core and penumbra of the legal concept space by developing a novel conceptual and methodological framework for measuring how fundamental a given concept is to law. The paper then implements that framework through one a series of three empirical studies featuring an analysis of: (a) every entry in Black’s Law Dictionary; (b) all federal statutes and regulations currently in force; (c) ~1 million judicial decisions; and (d) ~600,000 private contracts …
Martínez, Eric, Measuring Legal Concepts (February 4, 2024).
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