Posted by Orin Kerr:
The Web of Law:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_06_05-2005_06_11.shtml#1118158420
A post by Dave Hoffman at [1]PrawfsBlawg reminds me of Tom Smith's
very cool draft article on SSRN that I have been meaning to mention:
[2]The Web of Law.
Smith's article looks at legal citations from the standpoint of
network theory, and presents the results of a citation study performed
on Tom's behalf by the people at Lexis Nexis that looked at the
citation structure of nearly 4 million American legal precedents.
According to Smith, the study reveals that the citation of legal
precedents creates a scale-free network, and that allows for all sorts
of modeling from network theory that can shed light on legal dynamics.
From the introduction:
What determines whether a case makes it into the elite of cases
that are cited hundreds or thousands of times, instead of just a
few, or never? By studying the statistical dynamics of citation
over time, scholars using network theory could shed significant
light on what accounts for the success of a legal authority. How
much, for example, does a case�s merely being decided earlier
account for its citation frequency? How much of a difference does a
case having been decided by a higher court make? What about the
"fitness" of a case, in terms of its persuasiveness or analytical
acuity? Do these attributes explain in part a case�s flourishing,
survival, or extinction as a precedent? Do cases have a natural
life span? Does their authority tend to wax and wane, and does this
depend on the type of case? It is possible that if we study the
evolution of the legal network, the "Web of Law," we will discover
unsuspected historical dynamics in legal authority. Perhaps the
characteristics of legal evolution themselves have changed over
time. If there have been changes in the dynamics of legal
evolution, or other noticeable changes, perhaps they correspond to
recognized watersheds in legal history. As I discuss briefly below,
using network theory to analyze law may enable us to understand, in
a much more rigorous way than previously possible, the dynamics by
which interpretations of important laws, such as the Constitution
and landmark statutes, change over time.
Very interesting stuff, and also both well-written and relatively
short (with lots of cool graphs, too).
References
1. http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/article_spotlight/index.html
2. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=642863
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