Dr. Sebastiano Faro of ITTIG/CNR has published Computational social science, law and legal informatics (towards computational legal science), in Ginevra Peruginelli and Mario Ragona (Eds.), Legal informatics in Italy: Fifty years of studies, research and experiences (Naples, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2014).
Here is the abstract:
Legal informatics has been developed on the basis of the idea that the world of law could not ignore the profound changes in society brought about by the development of computer science and, in more general terms, of information and communication technologies; from this conviction the legal scholars’ interest in computing and new technologies was born as a set of tools, techniques, methodologies and approaches able to propose a new way of understanding and dealing with legal phenomena and also for supporting the activities of the lawyer. Among the possible future evolutions of legal informatics, this chapter emphasizes how this discipline, thanks to its method and interdisciplinary research program, can play a key role in mediating the encounter between law and the emerging research area called “computational social science”. This is an intersection between social sciences, informatics and the sciences of complexity, with which law will come inevitably into contact.