Bridging National and International Legal Data: Two Projects Based on the Japanese Legal Standard XML Schema for Comparative Law Studies
This work addresses the challenge of cross-jurisdictional legal analysis for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing standards and methods.
This paper tackles the problem of computational comparative law by developing an integrated framework that bridges Japanese and international legal data, resulting in a prototype system that identifies corresponding legal provisions across jurisdictions using multilingual embeddings and retrieval techniques.
This paper presents an integrated framework for computational comparative law by connecting two consecutive research projects based on the Japanese Legal Standard (JLS) XML schema. The first project establishes structural interoperability by developing a conversion pipeline from JLS to the Akoma Ntoso (AKN) standard, enabling Japanese statutes to be integrated into international LegalDocML-based legislative databases. Building on this foundation, the second project applies multilingual embedding models and semantic textual similarity techniques to identify corresponding provisions across national legal systems. A prototype system combining multilingual embeddings, FAISS retrieval, and Cross-Encoder reranking generates candidate correspondences and visualizes them as cross-jurisdictional networks for exploratory comparative analysis.