Smith, Thomas A.C., The Web of Law (Spring 2005). San Diego Legal Studies Research Paper No. 06-11.
“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 the Shepard’s citation service. This study demonstrates that the American case law network has the overall structure that network theory predicts it would. It is a highly skewed, scale-free, or similar network. The remarkably great degree of skew is significant. Precendential authority is concentrated in a remarkably small number of cases. Of over 4 million cases, the top 1000 most cited state and federal cases, only .025 percent, get about 80 percent of all citations. The vast majority of cases are rarely or never cited. The most cited 2 percent of US Supreme Court cases get 96 percent of all citations to Supreme Court cases. In that it consists largely of dead cases, the Web of Law closely resembles scientific paper citation networks, which consist mostly of dead papers.”
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