Search Results

This chapter focuses on information networks, consisting of items of data linked together in some way. Information networks are all, so far as we know, man-made, with perhaps the best known example being the World Wide Web. There are also some networks which could be considered information networks but which also have social aspects to them. Examples include networks of email communications, networks on social-networking websites such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and networks of weblogs and online journals.

This chapter describes models of the growth or formation of networks, with a particular focus on preferential attachment models. It starts with a discussion of the classic preferential attachment model for citation networks introduced by Price, including a complete derivation of the degree distribution in the limit of large network size. Subsequent sections introduce the Barabasi-Albert model and various generalized preferential attachment models, including models with addition or removal of extra nodes or edges and models with nonlinear preferential attachment. Also discussed are node copying models and models in which networks are formed by optimization processes, such as delivery networks or airline networks.

A discussion of information networks and their measurement. The world wide web is discussed at length, including HTML, HTTP, and the use of crawlers to measure network structure. Citation networks are also discussed in some detail, including their history, structure, and statistics, and the use of databases of citation records to construct networks. Other networks discussed include peer-to-peer networks, recommender networks, and keyword indexes.

The chapter argues that the network approach is a viable methodology in legal empirical research, which can be used to study the case law of the Court of Justice. To demonstrate this potential, the chapter: first, shows how to obtain detailed information about the law from the citation network; second, it illustrates how to assess the legal relevance of cases by looking at case citations; and, third, it explores how to infer the doctrinal influence of selected landmark cases. All examples adapt different citation network tools to the study of legal structures and legal discourse which can focus, frame, support, and guide doctrinal analysis.

Today judges are said to ‘see each other not only as servants and representatives of a particular polity, but also as fellow professionals in an endeavor that transcends national borders’ (A.M. Slaughter). This statement was made in the context of transnational litigation but it may also reflect a more general trend. In this chapter, which is part of a wider research project, we present findings on cross-citations between ten of Europe’s highest courts. We considered 636,172 decisions and found 1,430 cross-citations between 2000 and 2007. The first section of the chapter summarizes the data considered and the search methodology used. The next two sections present different ways of visualizing these data: on the one hand three types of bar charts, and on the other hand two network presentations of the cross-citations between the ten courts. Subsequently, we examine the relationship between incoming and outgoing citations, in particular whether some of our countries may be regarded as ‘the core’ and the others as ‘the periphery’.

This volume has its origins in the 2017 Academy of European Law summer course on the Law of the European Union which focused on new legal approaches to studying the Court of Justice. The chapters explore a number of innovative legal approaches to studying the Court. Each of these approaches differs from the classic, and still dominant, doctrinal work of understanding and systematizing the Court’s jurisprudence. Developing critical, large data, historical, sociological, and reflective institutional approaches to the Court of Justice, the contributors aim to enrich our understanding of the Court of Justice and to expand our understanding of the range of methods, approaches, and sources available to study it. The contributions exemplify the inter-disciplinarity which increasingly characterizes the study of the CJEU.