- Collection:
- Scholarly Works
- Title:
- Law's Semantic Self-Portrait: Discerning Doctrine with Co-Citation Networks and Keywords
- Creator:
- Miller, Joseph Scott
- Date of Original:
- 2019-01-01
- Subject:
- University of Georgia. School of Law
Law--Study and teaching
University of Georgia--Faculty - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Clarke County, Athens, 33.96095, -83.37794
- Medium:
- articles
- Type:
- Text
- Format:
- application/pdf
- Description:
- Originally uploaded at SSRN (https://ssrn.com/abstract=3212131).
An apex court’s body of cases has an internal texture, continually augmented by recent citations to earlier, topically related cases. How can we best describe that texture? The citation network shows a path. Specifically, what past Supreme Court cases do more recent Supreme Court cases tend to cite together, as if a topical pair? Using a web of those oft-cited pairs, what noun phrases appear in a given cluster of cases more often, relative to the rate at which those phrases appear in writings more generally? To answer these questions is to map, in detail, a body of decisional law. Using common network-analysis and corpus-linguistics tools, one can derive from a group of cases the key empirical facets of the legal doctrine embodied in that cluster of cases — a semantic self-portrait that the cases paint with their own words and citations. This paper provides a pair of case studies for revealing the latent semantic building blocks of legal doctrine. First, using a new citation dataset, I analyze the co-citation network of a sharply defined group of Supreme Court cases (in this instance, cases on the Warsaw Convention, a treaty that limits liability for loss or injury in international air travel, and other cases related thereto). Second, building on a citation dataset from prior work, I analyze the co-citation network of all the Supreme Court’s intellectual property cases from 1947 to 2018, inclusive. With these empirical studies, I show that co-citation analysis complements both traditional legal analysis — by establishing data about legal doctrine, from the bottom up, using large case networks — and the attitudinal-model studies from political science — by focusing on the substance of legal doctrine, rather than on judges’ votes in split cases placed on a right-left continuum.
citation network -- network analysis -- co-citation network -- Warsaw Convention -- intellectual property -- Supreme Court -- Intellectual Property Law -- Jurisprudence -- Supreme Court of the United States - External Identifiers:
- Metadata URL:
- https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1318
- Holding Institution:
- Alexander Campbell King Law Library
- Rights:
-
