Case law retrieval by concept search and visualization

Uijttenbroek, Elisabeth M.; Klein, Michel; Lodder, A.R.; Harmelen, Frank van

doi:10.1145/1276318.1276336

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 5 publications

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“…In the current era of Big Data, vast electronic databases of legal documents present opportunities for new approaches to the visualization and analysis of US case law. Recent efforts have focused on visualizing the results of data mining (Gaur, 2011) and concept searches (Uijttenbroek, Klein, Lodder, & Harmelen, 2007), while others are exploring ways to visualize legal data such as citation networks (Bommarito, Katz, Zelner, & Fowler, 2010) and categories of court cases (Hook, 2007), and temporally visualizing case histories (C. Harris, Allen, Plaisant, & Shneiderman, 1999). The University of Baltimore School of Law is developing new software to plot relationships between various court opinions (University of Baltimore School of Law, 2013), and Ravel has grown into a popular online legal search, analytics, and visualization platform (Ravel, 2014).…”

Section: Introduction and Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where is precedent set? An exploratory geovisualization of State Supreme Court cases

Stoler

Roman

2015

Journal of Maps

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Vast data warehouses of legal documents and court decisions present an opportunity for data visualization and analysis, yet court decisions have rarely been visualized geographically. We explore the potential for geographic visualization of judicial case data by mapping a state-level standardized score calculated from 135 State Supreme Court abortion cases published in the USA between 1973 and 2013, and again from 228 redistricting cases published between 1962 and 2013. We observe substantial variation in Z-scores across the USA, with geographic patterning of high values observed for redistricting cases, but not for abortion cases. The resulting maps suggest that the geovisualization of court decisions may aid the generation and testing of hypotheses about whether or not certain states disproportionately set legal precedent and subsequently influence the national discourse on a given issue. This type of geovisualization may also have implications for forum shopping and other geographically explicit legal strategies.

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