Network analysis in the legal domain: a complex model for European Union legal sources

Koniaris, Marios; Anagnostopoulos, Ioannis; Vassiliou, Yannis

doi:10.1093/comnet/cnx029

Cited by 68 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…This network approach has since then been proposed in various contexts and jurisdictions [27,1,47,10,9], but always focusing on citations. To that regard, it is worth citing the recent study analysing the relations between treaties, articles and legal decisions of the European Union [20] as it is an attempt to investigate the intricate and complex structure of a legal network depicting relations at different levels. However, its main contribution is to provide evidence for the "small-worl" aspect of the network and to show that the degree distribution follows a power-law.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysing the first case of the International Criminal Court from a network-science perspective

Tarissan

Nollez-Goldbach

2016

jcomplexnetw

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This paper analyses the multi-level network composed of the legal decisions taken by the International Criminal Court since its creation in 2002. As many real-world networks, legal networks lend themselves to the use of graphs in which nodes represent the decisions taken by the Court and links stand for citations between decisions. Although useful, this framework does not account for the inherent complexity and hierarchy commonly observed in real data. In the context of legal networks in particular, interactions between decisions take place at various levels, inducing a two-level structure. We propose here to rely on a hybrid version of bipartite graphs, which allows to represent different types of links in multi-level networks. We assess the relevance of this approach by analysing the hybrid structure of the first case of the Court and by confronting it with standard approaches focusing on direct citation processes. We validate the outcomes by providing juridical interpretations of the results, which shed some light on the procedural aspects of the International Criminal Court and put an emphasis on the key themes addressed by this jurisdiction. Thus, for the first time, this work converges two very different approaches to account for the multi-level complexity in legal networks.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysing the first case of the International Criminal Court from a network-science perspective

Tarissan

Nollez-Goldbach

2016

jcomplexnetw

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“…While the American legal system has been the one that has undergone the widest series of studies in this direction, recently, various researchers applied network analysis in the civil law domain, as well. The authors of [54] propose a network-based approach to model the law. Network analysis techniques were also employed in [55], demonstrating an online toolkit allowing legal scholars to apply network analysis and visual techniques to the entire corpus of EU case law.…”

Section: Legal Text Retrievalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Diversification Techniques for Legal Information Retrieval

2017

Self Cite

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"Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximizing access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law". In accordance with the aforementioned declaration on free access to law by legal information institutes of the world, a plethora of legal information is available through the Internet, while the provision of legal information has never before been easier. Given that law is accessed by a much wider group of people, the majority of whom are not legally trained or qualified, diversification techniques should be employed in the context of legal information retrieval, as to increase user satisfaction. We address the diversification of results in legal search by adopting several state of the art methods from the web search, network analysis and text summarization domains. We provide an exhaustive evaluation of the methods, using a standard dataset from the common law domain that we objectively annotated with relevance judgments for this purpose. Our results: (i) reveal that users receive broader insights across the results they get from a legal information retrieval system; (ii) demonstrate that web search diversification techniques outperform other approaches (e.g., summarization-based, graph-based methods) in the context of legal diversification; and (iii) offer balance boundaries between reinforcing relevant documents or sampling the information space around the legal query.

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“…With regard to international courts, Derlen et al, and Mirshavalad et al, [12], [16], [17] applied network analysis to the case law of the Court of Justice, presenting the application of PageRank [18] and community detection techniques [17] to get an overview of the structure of the Court's network. The same authors in [12] examined the structural properties of the case law and the legislative network of the European Union without quantifying the importance of individual nodes-cases. Lupu and Voeten [19] studied the case law of the European Court of Human Rights using hubs and authorities as proxies for statistical analysis of the case law properties.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selecting the cases that defined Europe: Complementary metrics for a network analysis

Tarissan

Panagis²,

Sadl³

2016

2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)

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Do case citations reflect the "real" importance of individual judgments for the legal system concerned? This question has long been puzzling empirical legal scholars. Existing research typically studies case citation networks as a whole applying traditional network metrics stemming from graph theory. Those approaches are able to detect globally important cases, but since they do not take time explicitly into account, they cannot provide a comprehensive account of the dynamics behind the network structure and its evolution. In this paper we provide such a description, using two node importance metrics that take time into account to study important cases in the Court of Justice of the European Union over time. We then compare cases deemed as important by the metrics, with a set of 50 cases selected by the Court as the most important (landmark) cases. Our contribution is twofold. First, with regard to network science, we show that structural and time-related properties are complementary, and necessary to obtain a complete and nuanced picture of the citation network. Second, with regard to the case law of the Court, this study provides empirical evidence clarifying the motivation of the Court when selecting the landmark cases, revealing the importance of symbolic and historical cases in the selection. In addition, the temporal analysis sheds new light on the network properties specific to the landmark cases that distinguishes them from the rest of the cases. We validate our results by providing legal interpretations that sustain the highlights provided by the proposed network analysis.

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Network analysis in the legal domain: a complex model for European Union legal sources

Cited by 68 publications

References 58 publications

Analysing the first case of the International Criminal Court from a network-science perspective

Analysing the first case of the International Criminal Court from a network-science perspective

Evaluation of Diversification Techniques for Legal Information Retrieval

Selecting the cases that defined Europe: Complementary metrics for a network analysis

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