Inter-Court Relations in the American Legal System--Using New Technologies to Examine Communication of Precedent

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This study will develop and apply innovative information technologies to investigate the evolution and dissemination of precedent in the American legal system. In particular, it will develop a tool for automated data and network acquisition from textual data on citation patterns in Takings Clause cases between 1900 and the present. Our study will harness the power of information technology and spatial analytic techniques, including: automated file acquisition and transformation; data management based on a relational database; mapping (network) relations between cases; quantitative linguistic analyses; and code-and-retrieve software (to facilitate qualitative review). This project will not only break important new ground substantively, but also will develop new methodological approaches drawing on information technologies that have heretofore been seriously under-utilized within social research. Development of these approaches also promises to foster synergies between application developers and social scientists, and to enhance transparency and rigor of text-based research across a range of disciplines.