Michael James Bommarito II and Daniel Martin Katz have posted Properties of the United States Code Citation Network (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Department of Political Science and University of Michigan Law School) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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The United States Code is a body of documents that collectively comprises the statutory law of the United States. In this short paper, we investigate the properties of the network of citations contained within the Code - most notably its degree distribution. Acknowledging the text contained within each of the Code's section nodes, we adjust our interpretation of the nodes to control for section length. Though we find a number of interesting properties in these degree distributions, we demonstrate that a power law distribution is not an appropriate model for this system.
