Hubs In The U.S. Web Of Law: Supreme Court Cases Are Just Like Celebrities——That Stand on Behalf Of Legal Coherence
https://digital.sandiego.edu/lwpa_econ/art8/
People cannot be more used to the social media network nowadays. In a social media network, nodes are individual users and edges are the links representing “friendship” (mutual directional) or “influence” (one-direction) . Most nodes are only connected to a limited number of people, while there are always a few people who hold connections with a large, expansive group. Usually, they are TV celebrities or politicians.
This paper argues that there is a “Web of Law” existing in the U.S. legal system, which is proved to hold very similar, (if not same) structure and properties mathematically with typical social networks——especially the one kind called “scale-free network”. In a scale-free network, there are “hubs” that are so frequently connected with other nodes that their linkage density pushes up the median value of the whole network significantly, and thus the median value cannot be an indicator of the proper “scale” of the network. In the case of the legal system, the hubs are the cases that were cited most frequently——reasonably more likely to be supreme court case——they are celebrities in the world of legal precedents.
Figure 13. The power-law citation frequency distribution of American case law
While much ink has been spilt on the citation network study of the scientific paper, few yet to be done by legal scholars. The author believed one significant role of such study is to prove the “intellectual coherence” of the American legal system. The U.S. legal system is intensively precedence-based, but at the same time, it has long suffered from the critics of giving the judges too much power in interpreting the situation and the freedom of referring to different cases as the justification of his logic. The legal citation frequency, however, shows the power-law distribution of scale-free network, meaning the nodes that are “rich” in connections are more likely to get “richer” by new additional connections. Such a clear pattern can never be formed if the citation of cases is majorly generated by arbitrary decision. Moreover, as a result, the hub cases appeared, and clusters naturally form. The change of hub cases can be an indicator of the change of legal authorities, and the clustering produced semantically can be compared with the traditional artificial categories of law subfields.