Exploring Relationships between Legal Concepts in the United States Supreme Court

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