Quantifying long-term impact of court decisions

• Main Authors: Jorge C. Leitão, Sune Lehmann, Henrik Palmer Olsen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2019-01-01
• Series: Applied Network Science
• Subjects: Law; Citation networks; Bass model; Preferential attachment
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41109-018-0110-3

Abstract In this work, we investigate how court decisions aggregate citations in the European Court of Human Rights. Using the Bass model, we quantify the prevalence of the rich-get-richer phenomenon. We find that the Bass model provides an excellent description of how individual decisions accumulate citations. Our analysis reveals that citations to a large fraction of decisions are, in fact, explained by the rich-get-richer phenomenon. Based on our statistical model, we argue that network properties are insufficient to explain the rich-get-richer effect, suggesting that intrinsic properties of decisions drive a significant part of the observed citation patterns. We conclude by discussing the legal implications of our findings.