Sebastiano Faro & Nicola Lettieri 
Law and computational social science 

Social sciences are going through a phase of profound change due to three main factors: the resort to computational approaches, the integration, enabled by computational tools, among different disciplines and sciences, and the ever increasing availablity of information in electronic format regarding the most varied aspects of reality. Within the space of a very short time, the new scientific paradigm of computational social science emerged taking the form of an unprecedented intersection among social, information and complexity sciences.

The relationship between law and computational social science certainly deserves being developed: the scientific paradigm underlying this emerging research area can focus greater attention by lawyers on the empirical dimension of legal phenomena and greater openness to dialogue with other disciplines, two basic conditions for finding appropriate legal responses to the complexity and dynamism of contemporary society. Moreover, computational social science provides lawyers with methods and tools that seem to be able to offer a new scientific basis for their activities in the various contexts of interpretation and application of the law and also to the processes of policy and rule making.

This volume collects contributions from authors with etherogeneous background. Its aims are encouraging lawyers to imagine the application of the methods of computational social science to authentically legal problems and stimulating a reflection on whether and how the law and the way of thinking of a lawyer can be transformed by their encounter with the research paradigm of computational social science.