Citation Analysis and Beyond: in Search of Indicators Measuring Case Law Importance

Could legal importance of a judicial decision be established by analyzing its position in a case law citation network? A network of nearly half a million citations was used to test a great variety of social network algorithms against three external benchmarks. All these algorithms were outperformed by a tailored variant of degree centrality. Furthermore, regression analysis was used to explore the possible relevance of eleven variables to the legal importance of case law.