Network Analysis in Law
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Network analysis is a mathematical-statistical method based on graph theory providing tools to visualize a large number of different entities and relations among them. Using network analysis methods in legal domain is a rather novel way of analyzing legal sources. However, there has been an increasing interest over the past few years in these methods and legal scholars are adopting this approach more and more often nowadays. The main reason is that network analysis is suitable for being applied to systems involving many entities (legal sources) and many relations among them (citations or similarities). The great part of every lawyer’s job is searching through relevant judicial decisions, which means searching for relevant case law. With the growing number of judicial decisions, this task becomes challenging even for experts. However, legal and computer experts are trying to provide tools for processing a large number of legal texts and extracting relevant information even for users without any technical background. Network analysis is just one of the ways to handle such issue. The network usually contains two types of data: nodes (or vertices) and edges (or links). Nodes usually represent legal sources (such as individual codes, laws, articles or judicial decisions) and edges represent relations among them (such as citation references or similarities). In this presentationj I apply network analysis methods to case law of Supreme, Supreme Administrative and Constitutional court to find what relations are among them. For this purpose I use whole texts and whole datasets of case law and process them. I apply different types of network analysis on the processed documents and I empirically evaluate whether the performance of legal research based on network analysis is better than manual research. If so, I design a tool based on previous results to help in case law research using the most suitable network analysis method. The Czech legal system is one of the continental legal systems based on codified legal documents and prescriptions. Judicial decisions are not as legally binding as codes, they are subjectively binding. But judicial decisions of Supreme, Supreme Administrative and Constitutional court are considered to be binding on the legally argumentative level. There is a necessity regarding basic principles of legal certainty, that the court decides in the same way given the same circumstances. For these reasons, case law of the three highest courts is an important legal source for lawyers, judges, students or even public. However, case law research is still quite inefficient given the information technology possibilities available today. It is a general aim of this work to provide an empirical evaluation of avalaible network analysis methods and to make a necessary step toward automatic processing of case law and its application. |
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