Lost in legal data visualization? A legal scholar’s view on the ECB dedicated section in EUR-Lex

Legal data visualisation and legal knowledge visualisation are increasingly attracting the attention of the legal community, given their alleged positive impact on legal teaching, access to and understanding of the law by citizens and/or litigants, or the production of new legal products or services (e.g. Stanford Legal Design Lab). On the other hand, very few legal research studies are based on and integrate into their analysis the visualization of legal data, legal information, or of legal knowledge. Even fewer studies examine the impact of these tools on legal research methodology.
Legal scholars are no less skilled and familiar with the use of IT tools, from preparing their lectures (e.g. ppt presentations) to consulting online databases or using expert systems to review articles. Is the lack of interest in legal data visualisation tools an expression of any technological difficulty? To use Friedrich Lachmayer's metaphor, "Legal informatics, which includes the visualisation of legal data, is about building a bridge between law and informatics. But in the design of visualisation tools, informatics scholars expect too much from legal scholars, then the latter give up and the bridge collapses. Or does the problem stem from a specific feature of the law, namely the ontological formalism of legal norms, which would prevent the dissemination of these tools - or render them useless?
Rather than exploring this issue from a theoretical perspective, this study will examine the relevance of legal data visualization tools through the analysis of a concrete case, namely the updating that the present author is to carry out of the "Euro" section, published in the French Répertoire Dalloz. This section, originally written in 2002 by Professor Jean-Victor Louis, analyses the monetary law of the Union. In addition to updating the references to the relevant legal acts and instruments in force, this new version should also highlight changes to the content of the lex monetae and related legislation (protection of banknotes and coins, anti-counterfeiting measures, conversion and rounding procedures, etc.). As part of the updating process, the research methodology will be based on the visualisation tools made available by EUR-lex. The study will therefore examine the extent to which these tools have supported the research and facilitated the identification of new insights. Or, on the contrary, to what extent they proved to be inappropriate or insufficient and, if so, for what reasons?