Using network analysis to identify generic legal trends in European Human Rights Law

Henrik Palmer Olsen

Jeudi 16 Novembre 2017, 14h, salle 26-00/332, Campus Jussieu

This presentation explores how the complete collected set of judgments from the European Court of Human Rights can be presented as a network of case to references, and how this network can be analysed via the use of already known network analysis approaches. The presentation will first show how network analysis can be used to calculate the main legal content of a case (i.e. which legal right the case is mostly concerned with and for which the case is therefore a precedent). It will then move on to showing how, Page-rank of a case in the total network of cases can be compared to the Page-rank of the same case in its local network and how this comparison can be used to further calculate generic centrality in the overall network. In using this novel approach, it is possible to identify cases that have strong precedent, not for a specific right, but for more generic legal content that the Court uses in dealing with applications from citizens.