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Using the West Key Number System as a Data Collection
and Coding Device for Empirical Legal Scholarship:
Demonstrating
the Method via a Study of
Contract
Interpretation
ABSTRACT
Empirical
research is an increasingly important type of legal scholarship. Such research generally requires the
collection and coding of large quantities of data. These tasks pose critical challenges for
legal scholars. Most crucially, they are
often resource-intensive. The primary
purpose of this article is to explain how researchers can use the West Key
Number System to dramatically streamline the process of data collection and
coding. The article accomplishes this,
in part, through a demonstration: it employs the Key Number System to conduct
an empirical study of contract interpretation.
Contract interpretation is one of
the most significant areas of commercial law.
And the subject has received considerable scholarly attention during the
last decade. Virtually all academic work
in this field is doctrinal or theoretical. But numerous contract interpretation issues cry
out for empirical investigation. The
secondary purpose of this article is to test one of the central claims in the judicial
and academic debate over the optimal method of contract interpretation—the claim
that the “contextualist” approach to interpretation results in more litigation over
the meaning of contracts than does the “textualist” approach. The results of the study set forth below are
inconsistent with that thesis. By
thirteen of fourteen measures, there was no statistically significant
difference in the amount of interpretation litigation between textualist and
contextualist regimes. And for the
fourteenth measure, while there was a statistically significant difference, the
result was the opposite of that predicted by textualist theory: there was more
litigation under textualism.
