Analysing the first case of the International Criminal Court from a network-science perspective

This paper analyses the multi-level network composed of the legal decisions taken by the International Criminal Court since its creation in 2002. As many real-world networks, legal networks lend themselves to the use of graphs in which nodes represent the decisions taken by the Court and links stand for citations between decisions. Although useful, this framework does not account for the inherent complexity and hierarchy commonly observed in real data. In the context of legal networks in particular, interactions between decisions take place at various levels, inducing a two-level structure. We propose here to rely on a hybrid version of bipartite graphs, which allows to represent different types of links in multi-level networks. We assess the relevance of this approach by analysing the hybrid structure of the first case of the Court and by confronting it with standard approaches focusing on direct citation processes. We validate the outcomes by providing juridical interpretations of the results, which shed some light on the procedural aspects of the International Criminal Court and put an emphasis on the key themes addressed by this jurisdiction. Thus, for the first time, this work converges two very different approaches to account for the multi-level complexity in legal networks.