A Network of Legal Citations from the Supreme Court of India

Posted: 10 Mar 2015 Last revised: 29 May 2015

See all articles by Rahul Chakraborty

Rahul Chakraborty

Centre for Sustainable Mobility, Transport and Urban Governance Division, The Energy and Resources Institute

Simonti Chakraborty

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Rajendra Prasad Kundu

Jawaharlal Nehru University

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

Chakraborty, Rahul and Chakraborty, Simonti and Kundu, Rajendra Prasad, A Network of Legal Citations from the Supreme Court of India (March 8, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2575330

Rahul Chakraborty

Centre for Sustainable Mobility, Transport and Urban Governance Division, The Energy and Resources Institute ( email )

Darbari Seth Block, IHC Complex
Lodhi Road
New Delhi, 110 003
India

Simonti Chakraborty

Jawaharlal Nehru University ( email )

New Delhi, DE 110067
India

Rajendra Prasad Kundu (Contact Author)

Jawaharlal Nehru University ( email )

Vasant Vihar
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi, DE Delhi 110067
India

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