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

这项研究将开发和应用创新的信息技术，以调查先例在美国法律体系中的演变和传播。特别是，它将开发一个工具，用于从1900年至今的征用条款案例中关于引文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：自动文件获取和转换；基于关系数据库的数据管理；案例之间的映射(网络)关系；定量语言分析；以及编码和检索软件(以促进定性审查)。该项目不仅将在实质上开辟重要的新领域，还将利用迄今为止在社会研究中严重未得到充分利用的信息技术，开发新的方法方法。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，并提高基于文本的研究在一系列学科中的透明度和严谨性。

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.