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Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Supreme Court PrecedentsJames H. FowlerUC San Diego Division of Social Sciences; UC San Diego School of Medicine Timothy R. JohnsonUniversity of Minnesota James F. Spriggs II IIWashington University in Saint Louis - Department of Political Science; Washington University in Saint Louis - Center for Empirical Research in the Law Sangick JeonStanford University - Department of Political Science Paul J. WahlbeckGeorge Washington University Political Analysis, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 324-346, July 2007 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.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 46 Keywords: Supreme Court, precedent, law, citation analysis, case importance JEL Classification: K40, K49 Accepted Paper SeriesDate posted: July 3, 2006 ; Last revised: September 29, 2009Suggested CitationContact Information
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