Legal News

The Law is Beautiful

By rdasgupta

At Fastcase we are a bit obsessed with slick data visualizations.  So it should come as no surprise that we are gaga over Jonathon Feinberg’s brilliant web app, Wordle.

This delightful app generates gorgeous “word clouds” from any text that you feed it.  You can cut and paste text directly or even type in a url and let Wordle grab the text for you.

In addition to creating stunning images, Wordle is a terrific learning tool.   Words used more frequently in the source text appear more prominently in it’s word clouds making key themes and words pop off the page.  (And it kind of reminds us of our own Interactive Timeline).

Here are the Wordle word clouds for three landmark Supreme Court decisions which exemplify why our country is an amazing place to live :  Tinker. v. Des Moines (1969), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

Can you tell which world cloud goes with each decision?

Enjoy (and have a great weekend).

Full post as published by Fastcase Legal News on May 07, 2010 (boomark / email).