Winkels et al. on Determining Authority of Dutch Case Law

Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels of the Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam, Jelle De Ruyter of the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law, and Henryk Kroese of the University of Amsterdam – Faculty of Natural Science, Mathematics and Information Science, have published Determining Authority of Dutch Case Law, in K. M. Atkinson (Ed.), Legal Knowledge and Information Systems - JURIX 2011: The Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference (pp. 103-112) (IOS Press, 2011). Here is the abstract:

In this paper we present the results of two studies to see whether the analysis of the network of citations between cases can be used as an indication of the relevance and authority in the Dutch legal system. Fowler e.a. [here and here] have shown such results for the US common law system, but given the different status of case law in continental tradition it is not clear whether this will hold in the Netherlands. Moreover, we introduce a way to validate the results using selections made by human experts for legal education. We discuss the results and conclude that network analysis of cases is a useful tool for legal research.

Boulet, Mazzega, and Bourcier on A Network Approach to the French System of Legal Codes Part 1

Dr. Romain Boulet of UMR ESPACE-DEV, IRD; Dr. Pierre Mazzega of UnB/IRD and UPS (OMP), CNRS, IRD; and Dr. Danièle Bourcier of CERSA CNRS, have published A network approach to the French system of legal codes—part I: analysis of a dense network, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 19, 333-355 (2011). Here is the abstract:

We explore one aspect of the structure of a codified legal system at the national level using a new type of representation to understand the strong or weak dependencies between the various fields of law. In Part I of this study, we analyze the graph associated with the network in which each French legal code is a vertex and an edge is produced between two vertices when a code cites another code at least one time. We show that this network distinguishes from many other real networks from a high density, giving it a particular structure that we call concentrated world and that differentiates a national legal system (as considered with a resolution at the code level) from small-world graphs identified in many social networks. Our analysis then shows that a few communities (groups of highly wired vertices) of codes covering large domains of regulation are structuring the whole system. Indeed we mainly find a central group of influent codes, a group of codes related to social issues and a group of codes dealing with territories and natural resources. The study of this codified legal system is also of interest in the field of the analysis of real networks. In particular we examine the impact of the high density on the structural characteristics of the graph and on the ways communities are searched for. Finally we provide an original visualization of this graph on an hemicyle-like plot, this representation being based on a statistical reduction of dissimilarity measures between vertices. In Part II (a following paper) we show how the consideration of the weights attributed to each edge in the network in proportion to the number of citations between two vertices (codes) allows deepening the analysis of the French legal system.

Lupu & Voeten on The Role of Precedent at the European Court of Human Rights: A Network Analysis of Case Citations

Yonatan Lupu of the University of California, San Diego Department of Political Science and Professor Erik Voeten of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, have posted The Role of Precedent at the European Court of Human Rights: A Network Analysis of Case Citations. The authors presented the paper at the 2010 Political Networks Conference, held 19-21 May 2010 at the Duke University Department of Political Science in Durham, North Carolina, USA. Here is the abstract of the paper:

While political scientists have become increasingly interested in the output of international courts, they have paid little attention to the manner by which these courts justify their decisions and develop legal norms. We address these issues through a network analysis of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) citations. We argue that, like domestic review courts, the ECtHR uses its legal justifications at least in part to convince “lower” (domestic) courts of the legitimacy of its judgments. Several empirical observations are consistent with this view. First, country-specific factors do not determine the case-law on which the Court relies. Instead, it cites precedent based on the legal issues in the case. Second, the Court is more careful to embed judgments in its existing case law with respect to the more politically sensitive decisions. Third, the court embeds its judgments in case-law more when the respondent government is from a common law legal system where the courts traditionally rely more on similar justifications. In all, we conclude that the ECtHR by and large uses case law to justify its decisions in a way that is similar to domestic review courts. Finally, we highlight the utility of applying network analysis to further study the development of international legal norms.

Thanks to Professor Voeten for the URL of the paper.