Welcome to e-Law Document Repository. Networks in law. MeshForum I've seen this before, but there's a minor surge of interest on the SOCNET listserv on the network analysis of legal citations, so I thought I would mention it here.
The approach dates back at least four decades (e.g., Nagel 1964), but became more sophisticated in the mid-80s (e.g., Caldeira 1985, 1988). Yet most efforts before 2000 were still manually coded, and therefore limited in scope and scale. The transition to e-documentation and the rising popularity of social network analysis is beginning to revive the approach (e.g., Fowler etal, 2005; Smith 2005). The Web of Law by Thomas Smith. Scientists and mathematicians in recent years have become intensely interested in the structure of networks.
Networks turn out to be crucial to understanding everything from physics and biology, to economics and sociology. This article proposes that the science of networks has important contributions to make to the study of law as well. The network of American case law closely resembles the Web in structure and can be studied using techniques that are now being used to describe many other networks, some found in nature, and others created by human action. Studying the legal network can shed light on how the legal system evolves, and many other questions. I present in this article the preliminary results of a significant citation study of nearly four million American legal precedents, which was undertaken at my request by the LexisNexis corporation using the Shepard's citation service.