Big Law, Big Data

The adoption of European norms has led to a high degree of legal and policy convergence. However, national laws remain divergent in many ways, and the assessment of discrepancies is becoming increasingly problematic because of the growing volumes of legislation. So far, comparative law has been the go-to solution for investigating similarities and differences between Member States as a result of harmonization policies. However, the vast complexity of current multilevel governance structures and their policies challenges the usefulness of classical comparative law as a method of investigation for such meta-issues. This article holds that comparative law can be considered Big Data and investigated as such. In other words, more complex and voluminous law and legal interpretations can be either coded into more quantitative observations on the basis of the premises of numerical comparative law, or, alternatively, they can be analysed with the help of new research technologies.