Exploring Relationships between Legal Concepts in the United States Supreme Court

23 Pages Posted: 19 Apr 2011

See all articles by Michael James Bommarito

Michael James Bommarito

273 Ventures; Licensio, LLC; Stanford Center for Legal Informatics; Michigan State College of Law; Bommarito Consulting, LLC

Date Written: November 5, 2009

Abstract

We empirically investigate the properties of concepts within the United States Supreme Court corpus using LexisNexis(R) headnotes. By analyzing the relationships between concepts, we uncover structure embedded both within cases and across cases. Furthermore, we estimate the dimensionality of the Supreme Court concept space and thus identify the dominant concepts of the corpus both within a given period and cumulatively. These results provide insight both into the history of these legal concepts and the Court as a whole, proving valuable to a wide range of legal scholars.

Keywords: United States Supreme Court, headnotes, concept map, citation, co-occurrence, dimensionality, legal network, judicial citation

JEL Classification: C63, K40, K, D71, D72

Suggested Citation

Bommarito, Michael James, Exploring Relationships between Legal Concepts in the United States Supreme Court (November 5, 2009). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1814169 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1814169

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