An interesting citation paper caught my eye, principally for its research design. In Citation Stickiness, Computer-Assisted Legal Research, and the Universe of Thinkable Thoughts, Aaron Kirschenfeld (UNC) and Alexa Chew (UNC), set out to explore how citation “stickiness” has survived the emergence of a “digital era” in legal research.
What the paper means by “stickiness” is that, in theory, the percentage of sticky citations in courts’ opinions would be something approaching 100%. That is, the parties would discuss the relevant authorities in their briefs, and the court would rely on the same authorities in its opinions.
Setting aside from the paper’s substantive contribution on “stickiness,” for me the paper’s main analytic move is to assess “stickiness” across dynamic legal research platforms over time. While the data are limited to a small handful of cases (N=325) from a single Circuit (CA4) and a handful of years (1957, 1987, and 2017), I anticipate that other research will employ a similar move to gain additional insights on how the emergence of the “digital era” informs law-related output. The abstract follows.
“Legal information has been available in widespread digital format for more than forty years. In that time, law librarians have wondered whether this digital switch has changed how law students and lawyers conduct research and, if so, what those changes are. Does legal research differ when conducted in print sources rather than computerized sources? What influence did the systems of organizing law in the print era have on the digital systems that followed?
While we cannot put these questions to rest, we hope to shed some light on those difference by studying the work of lawyers and courts from the print era, the transition-to-digital era, and the digital era. Using a metric called “citation stickiness,” we studied how often parties to an appeal and the judges hearing that appeal agreed on the cases relevant to resolve the issues on appeal. This, we hoped, would also show whether there were perceptible differences in coherence and stability of the legal information landscape
Citation stickiness works like this: a citation is “sticky” if it appears in at least one party’s brief and then again in the court opinion. In an initial study of 325 federal court cases from 2017, 49% of the 7,552 cases that were cited in the courts’ opinions had been cited by at least one party in a brief.
This study considers cases from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit decided in 1957, 1987, and 2017. After examining the citations in the briefs and opinions in our sample of cases, we compare our findings from the pre-digital era and from the digital era. What we learned surprised us.”
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