Mapping the Social Life of the Law: An Alternative Approach to Legal Research

38 Pages Posted: 24 Oct 2007

See all articles by Ian Gallacher

Ian Gallacher

Syracuse University - College of Law

Date Written: October 24, 2007

Abstract

As the law moves inexorably to a digital publication model in which books no longer play a role, the problem of how to continue to make the law available to all becomes more acute. Open access initiatives already exist, and more are on the way, but all are limited by their inability to provide more than self-indexed search options for their users. Self-indexing, although a powerful alternative to the traditional pre-indexed searching made possible by systems like West's "Key Number" digests, has inherent limitations which make it a poor choice as the sole means of researching the law. But developing a new pre-indexed legal digest would be a prohibitively expensive and complex undertaking, making it unlikely that open access legal information sites can develop and maintain a fully-implemented digesting approach to legal research. This article proposes a reconceptualization of the information already contained within most American judicial opinions in order to permit open access sites to offer a form of pre-indexed research to their users. By mapping a case's location in a graphical representation of the doctrinal development of an issue under consideration, this approach allows the court's citations to prior authority to act as a pre-indexing tool, allows the researcher to update the law by showing more recent cases that have cited to the target case, and gives the researcher the opportunity to trace network links in order to uncover connections between cases that might otherwise have been difficult to discern.

Keywords: legal research

JEL Classification: K40

Suggested Citation

Gallacher, Ian, Mapping the Social Life of the Law: An Alternative Approach to Legal Research (October 24, 2007). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1024176 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1024176

Ian Gallacher (Contact Author)

Syracuse University - College of Law ( email )

Syracuse, NY 13244-1030
United States

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