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Newtork Theory of the Law

Newtork Theory of the Law from excited utterances:

Thomas A.C. Smith, law professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, has written a very interesting article entitled The Web of Law.

Here is a portion of the abstract:

Scientists and mathematicians in recent years have become intensely interested in the structure of networks. Networks turn out to be crucial to understanding everything from physics and biology, to economics and sociology.

This article proposes that the science of networks has important contributions to make to the study of law as well. Legal scholars have yet to study, or even recognize as such, one of the largest, most accessible, and best documented human-created networks in existence. This is the centuries-old network of case law and other legal authorities into which lawyers, judges, and legal scholars routinely delve in order to discover what the law is on any given topic. The network of American case law closely resembles the Web in structure. It has the peculiar mathematical and statistical properties that networks have. It can be studied using techniques that are now being used to describe many other networks, some found in nature, and others created by human action.

Studying the legal network can shed light on how the legal system evolves, and many other questions. To initiate what I hope will become a fruitful new type of legal scholarship, I present in this article the preliminary results of a significant citation study of nearly four million American legal precedents, which was undertaken at my request by the LexisNexis corporation using their well-known Shepard's citation service. This study demonstrates that the American case law network has the overall structure that network theory predicts it would.