This essay expands the empirical analysis of overruled Supreme Court decisions by focusing on citation network centrality measures and comparative depreciation analysis to compare overruled decisions to matched peers. We demonstrate that those decisions which go on to be overruled tend to occupy more central citation network positions, cite more central cases, and depreciate at a slower rate th...

Legal reasoning requires identification, through search, of authoritative legal texts (such as statutes, constitutions, or prior judicial decisions) that apply to a given legal question. In this paper we model the concept of the law search as an organizing principle in the evolution of the corpus of legal texts, apply that model to U.S. Supreme Court opinions. We examine the underlying navigabl...

The importance of language and terminology for the law and the jurisprudence is beyond question because language is a central subject of a lawyer's work (Hatz 1963, Salton/McGill 1983). The particularity of the legal language is the use of a special vocabulary of legal terms which are used to express definite concepts. The presence of a particular term has specific connotations. Legal thinking ...

Judicial sentencing decisions should be guided by facts, not by chance. The present research however demonstrates that the sentencing decisions of experienced legal professionals are influenced by irrelevant sentencing demands even if they are blatantly determined at random. Participating legal experts anchored their sentencing decisions on a given sentencing demand and assimilated toward it ev...