A Network of Legal Citations from the Supreme Court of India
Posted: 10 Mar 2015 Last revised: 29 May 2015
Date Written: March 8, 2015
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to understand the citation behaviour of the Supreme Court of India with specific reference to its land acquisition decisions over the period 1960 to 2014. We construct the citation network of the above mentioned judgements and try to analyse the behaviour of the Apex court in terms of the network structure. Our analysis indicates that the network displays the characteristics of a `small world' and the degree distribution reveals that while most judgements in the network are never / very rarely cited there are some which are cited very often. We also find that there is significant overlap between the benches of the most prominent judgements in the network.
Keywords: Supreme Court of India, land acquisition, precedent, citation, citation network, small world.
JEL Classification: K4
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation