Sharing and Caring: Creating a Culture of Constructive Criticism in Computational Legal Studies
This addresses the problem of scholarly culture and reproducibility for researchers in computational legal studies, but it is incremental as it builds on existing open science ideas.
The paper tackles the lack of constructive criticism in computational legal studies by proposing seven principles to shift focus from papers to reproducible publications and encourage feedback throughout the research cycle, aiming to mature the field.
We introduce seven foundational principles for creating a culture of constructive criticism in computational legal studies. Beginning by challenging the current perception of papers as the primary scholarly output, we call for a more comprehensive interpretation of publications. We then suggest to make these publications computationally reproducible, releasing all of the data and all of the code all of the time, on time, and in the most functioning form possible. Subsequently, we invite constructive criticism in all phases of the publication life cycle. We posit that our proposals will help form our field, and float the idea of marking this maturity by the creation of a modern flagship publication outlet for computational legal studies.