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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach To Assessing Judicial Ideology, Joseph S. Miller
A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach To Assessing Judicial Ideology, Joseph S. Miller
Scholarly Works
What do judges really care about? Scholars have used various methods to identify a judge’s policy preferences. The standard method in political science, called the Martin-Quinn score, counts a judge’s votes for conservative or liberal outcomes. But judges don’t just vote, they give reasons in written opinions. Reason-giving is not only part of the tradition of common-law decision making but is also central to rule-of-law ideals, concerns that are not the focus most empirical methodologies. What’s more, the reasons a judge gives for reaching a conclusion provide powerful evidence for what the judge herself cares about. That is especially the …
Law's Semantic Self-Portrait: Discerning Doctrine With Co-Citation Networks And Keywords, Joseph S. Miller
Law's Semantic Self-Portrait: Discerning Doctrine With Co-Citation Networks And Keywords, Joseph S. Miller
Scholarly Works
An apex court’s body of cases has an internal texture, continually augmented by recent citations to earlier, topically related cases. How can we best describe that texture? The citation network shows a path. Specifically, what past Supreme Court cases do more recent Supreme Court cases tend to cite together, as if a topical pair? Using a web of those oft-cited pairs, what noun phrases appear in a given cluster of cases more often, relative to the rate at which those phrases appear in writings more generally? To answer these questions is to map, in detail, a body of decisional law. …