Abstract - Network Analysis and the Law

James Fowler, Timothy Johnson, James Spriggs, Sangick Jeon, and Paul Wahlbeck have a new paper entitled “Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Supreme Court Precedents.” Here is the abstract:

We construct the complete network of 28,951 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases they cite from 1792 to 2005. We illustrate some basic properties of this network and then describe a method for creating importance scores using the data to identify the most important Court precedents at any point in time. This method yields dynamic rankings that can be used to predict the future citation behavior of state courts, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court, and these rankings outperform several commonly used alternative measures of case importance.

The paper can be found here.

 

Comments

[Sean Wilson]

This is a fantastic paper. Unbelievable.