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CMLawLibraryBlog

The CM Law Library Blog seeks to inform the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law community about key legal education, research, practice, and law library news, with a particular focus on Cuyahoga County and Ohio as well as faculty research interests.

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Do Court Opinions have Friends? Using Social Networking Theory to Organize Case Law Databases

Jan Novak, Associate Director jan.novak@law.csuohio.edu | November 12, 2007 - 11:20

In Mapping the Social Life of the Law: An Alternative Approach to Legal Research , Syracuse University College of Law Professor Ian Gallacher focuses on how the increasingly digital legal publishing environment limits the ability of all users to access the law. Saying good-bye to print research techniques doesn’t burden the legal researcher with full and unfettered access to Westlaw and Lexis: both systems offer the self-indexing approaches of Boolean and natural language searching, as well as numerous pre-indexing editorial enhancements common to print tools. Gallacher, however, is concerned that open access alternatives to the major legal information vendors do not provide sufficient indexing retrieval mechanisms.

Gallacher uses social networking theory to describe how the pre-indexing inherent in judicial opinion writing can be used to map the relationships between authorities and the evolution of legal issues. The idea is to map case "A" by showing cases that relied upon case "A"(which cases would appear in a Shepards or Keycite) and cases which case "A" relied upon (which cases that would appear in a Lexis Table of Authorities). A database could employ a graphical representation to "allow the researcher to see the cases the court believed were most important to its decision on a particular issue and would permit the researcher to understand the relationships that exist between cases as they contribute to the development of a piece of legal doctrine."

Gallacher, Ian, "Mapping the Social Life of the Law: An Alternative Approach to Legal Research" (October 24, 2007). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1024176


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