Advantages of Scientific Legal Mapping for Research

This commentary serves as a technical report discussing the advantages of scientific legal mapping methods in legal research. It builds on the work of Kavanagh et al. regarding the global legal environment for LGBTQ+ sexuality and public health, emphasizing the benefits of adopting these methods in legal education and practice. Scientific legal mapping enhances the transparency and reproducibility of legal research, making findings more useful for empirical research, policymaking, and public information. The report outlines the core elements of scientific legal mapping, including scoping, legal research, and coding, while highlighting its advantages for legal scholars, comparative research consumers, and social scientists. By transforming legal texts into numeric data, these methods facilitate better analysis and visualization of laws, thereby improving accessibility for non-experts. The commentary concludes by noting the importance of documenting the research process and the need for legal scholars to collaborate with social scientists to enhance the validity of legal evaluations.