Law as a seamless web?

摘要

In this paper, we compare several network representations of the corpus of United States Supreme Court decisions (1791--2005). This corpus is not only of seminal importance, but also represents a highly structured and largely self-contained body of case law. As constructed herein, nodes represent whole cases or individual "opinion units" within cases. Edges represent either citations or semantic connections. As our broader goal is to better understand American common law development, we are particularly interested in the union, intersect and compliment of these various citation networks as they offer potential insight into the time developing structure of the "web of the law."