This is an experimental visualization of US Law using a Force Directed Graph. The chart uses a "hub and spoke" layout to represent the hierarchy of a given Title of the U.S. Code such as Title 17 (Copyright). The center circle represents a "parent" portion of the code - a portion with sub-portions under it (e.g. Chapter 10) and the surrounding circles on the edge represent the "child" portions that belong to that parent (Section 100, Section 101, Section 103..).

You can click on an outer circle to open up the "children" that reside under that circle. If a circle has "children", the circle border will be a thick grey. The selected circle will then be the new "parent", and its "children" portions will be displayed.

You can use the up arrow to navigate to the "root" circle (e.g. Title 17), and the left arrow to return to the "parent" of the currently opened part. You can also click anywhere in the whitespace to return to the top circle. By default, one of the Titles of the Code: Title 17 (Copyright) - is displayed. Click on the Circles to begin exploring the parts and sub-parts. Click on [Load Title 35] to load Title 35 - the Patent Code. Other data visualizations of the law are available here

You can read more about this app on this blog post.

This demo was made using the d3 data visualization framework and javascript. It was created by parsing .xml files of the US Code created by the US House of Representatives. These files contain the text of the titles of the US Federal Code "marked up" in .xml format. The US Code .xml files were then processed and parsed into .json files with the data and hierarchy. The data within the .json files were then fed into the d3 visualization framework for visualization. The d3 visualizations were modified to a suitable form for browsing the code.

Please Note: This visualization is a beta and has not been thoroughly tested. Please do not rely on the laws or the code being error free.

This is a modified version of Mike Bostock's force directed layout. Thanks to Mike Bostock for the excellent d3 visualization framework.