Precedent in International Courts: A Network Analysis of Case Citations by the European Court of Human Rights

Lupu, Yonatan; Voeten, Erik

doi:10.1017/s0007123411000433

Cited by 166 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Recently there has been more interest toward citation studies in law, where there appear to be two major directions: applying network analysis to citations (Zhang and Koppaka 2007;Leicht et al 2007;Winkels et al 2011;Lupu and Voeten 2012;van Opijnen 2012;Neale 2013) and classification systems allowing one to estimate the ''treatment'' status of the cited case (Jackson et al 2003;Galgani et al 2015). Zhang and Koppaka (2007) developed a Semantics-Based Legal Citation Network (see Zhang et al (2014) for an overview of related work), a tool that extracts and summarises citation information into a network, allowing the users to ''easily navigate in the citation networks and study how citations are interrelated and how legal issues have evolved in the past.''…”

Section: Citation Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

2017

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In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles (respectively, j ¼ 0:65 and j ¼ 0:95 for inter-and intra-annotator agreement). We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall j of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard.

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Section: Citation Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

2017

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“…From the point of view of empirical legal and political studies, corpus linguistics is a novel research tool, but fits perfectly to the big-data research agenda of the field. Recent research [12,15,35,43,44] has applied computer-based network analysis of courts' citation patterns. Corpus linguistic methods have also been used to add important detail to the otherwise broad picture of judicial practice that network analysis gives [29].…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing Achievement in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

Potts

Kjær

2015

Int J Semiot Law

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The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This represents a significant research gap, as the Tribunal's public discourse (notably its case law and Annual Reports) can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has ''irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law'' and lists six specific achievements: ''Holding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the law''. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of 'achievement' actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY.

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“…Principal-agent models, originally applied in political science to explain bureaucratic politics, are now employed in IR to understand international institutions such as the United Nations (Chapman 2011), the World Trade Organization (Elsig 2011), and the International Monetary Fund (Stone 2008), as well as in other IR areas like currency policy (Bearce 2003) and terrorism (Shapiro 2013). Judicial scholars are developing general theories of judicial behavior, covering American, international, and non-US national courts (Carrubba & Clark 2012), as well as applying concepts developed in US courts literature, such as the use of precedent to explain the behavior of international courts such as the ECHR (Lupu & Voeten 2011).…”

Section: Political Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Should We Leave Behind the Subfield of International Relations?

Reiter

2015

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

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This article considers whether political science should abandon the subfields of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations (IR), for new subfields of conflict, political economy, institutions, and behavior. The focus here is whether the field should abandon IR. The article lays out the arguments in favor of abandoning IR, describing scholarly trends that cross conventional subfield lines and are pushing to dissolve IR. Next, it argues that the costs of abandoning IR exceed the benefits, as new subfield divisions would remove some artificial walls but create new ones. Abandoning IR might undermine objective theory testing, would disadvantage the study of international system and structure, and would undermine the ability of political science to inform foreign policy debates. The article concludes by recommending that the field keep IR and its current subfield boundaries but that the walls between subfields should be kept low and porous.3.1

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Precedent in International Courts: A Network Analysis of Case Citations by the European Court of Human Rights

Cited by 166 publications

References 51 publications

Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

Constructing Achievement in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

Should We Leave Behind the Subfield of International Relations?

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