Citing case law : a comparative study of legal textbooks on European human rights law

Abstract

Recent years have seen increased interest in data-driven methods in legal research. Technologies provide new automated alternatives to traditional doctrinal approaches, which rely on manual information retrieval. In this article, we address one aspect of this development. On the basis of a citation network containing judgments on Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights, we identify which cases are most frequently cited and explicitly used in the legal argumentation of the European Court of Human Rights. We subsequently compare our findings with presentations of Article 14 in German, French and British textbooks. We aim to demonstrate that 1) network analysis can provide relevant input to legal analysis by relying on objective measures of case importance and 2) scholarship relying on traditional doctrinal methods is more dependent on the authors’ subjective outlook than necessary.