Inter-Court Relations in the American Legal System--Using New Technologies to Examine Communication of Precedent

本研究将开发和应用创新的信息技术，以调查美国法律的系统的先例的演变和传播。 特别是，它将开发一种工具，用于从1900年至今的征用条款案例中引用模式的文本数据中自动获取数据和网络。 我们的研究将利用信息技术和空间分析技术的力量，包括：自动化的文件采集和转换;基于关系数据库的数据管理;映射（网络）案件之间的关系;定量语言分析;和代码和检索软件（以方便定性审查）。 该项目不仅将在实质上开辟重要的新领域，而且还将利用迄今在社会研究中严重利用不足的信息技术，开发新的方法。这些方法的发展还有望促进应用程序开发人员和社会科学家之间的协同作用，并提高跨一系列学科的基于文本的研究的透明度和严谨性。

This study will develop and apply innovative information technologies to investigate the evolution and dissemination of precedent in the American legal system. In particular, it will develop a tool for automated data and network acquisition from textual data on citation patterns in Takings Clause cases between 1900 and the present. Our study will harness the power of information technology and spatial analytic techniques, including: automated file acquisition and transformation; data management based on a relational database; mapping (network) relations between cases; quantitative linguistic analyses; and code-and-retrieve software (to facilitate qualitative review). This project will not only break important new ground substantively, but also will develop new methodological approaches drawing on information technologies that have heretofore been seriously under-utilized within social research. Development of these approaches also promises to foster synergies between application developers and social scientists, and to enhance transparency and rigor of text-based research across a range of disciplines.