Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court
Abstract
We construct the complete network of 26,681 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases that cite them from 1791 to 2005. We describe a method for using the patterns in citations within and across cases to createimportance scoresthat identify the most legally relevant precedents in the network of Supreme Court law at any given point in time. Our measures are superior to existing network-based alternatives and, for example, offer information regarding case importance not evident in simple citation counts. We also demonstrate the validity of our measures by showing that they are strongly correlated with the future citation behavior of state courts, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing, we show that network analysis is a viable way of measuring how central a case is to law at the Court and suggest that it can be used to measure other legal concepts.
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Cites
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References 63 · Cited by 271
- Authors
- Fowler, J. H., Johnson, T. R., Spriggs, J. F., Jeon, S., & Wahlbeck, P. J.
- Affiliations
- University of California San Diego (US)
- University of Minnesota (US)
- Washington University in St. Louis (US)
- Stanford University (US)
- George Washington University (US)
- Venue
- Political Analysis
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2007
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 324-346
- ISSN
- 1047-1987 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4989
- OpenAlex
- W2099183456
- Cited by
- 271
- References
- 63
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 17 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 14 · 2013: 16 · 2012: 10
- FWCI
- 110.28
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Political Analysis (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Law › Judicial and Constitutional Studies
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Keywords
- United States Supreme Court, judicial precedent, citation networks, network centrality, majority opinion, citation behavior, state courts, appellate courts
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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