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44 San Diego L. Rev. 309 (2007)
The Web of Law

handle is hein.journals/sanlr44 and id is 315 raw text is: The Web of Law THOMAS-A. SMITH* TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION TO NETWORK THEORY ..... .......... : ............................................... 316 A. From Random Graphs to Scale-Free Networks ....................................... 317 B. Fitness and Network Evolution ................................................................ 322 II. T HE W EB O F L A W .............................................................................................. 324 A. The Distribution of Legal Citation Frequency ......................................... 324 B. All Federal and State Cases as a Group .................................................. 325 C. Particular Federal Courts ....................................................................... 329 D . State C ourts ............................................................................................. 334 E. The Citation Distribution of Legal Scholarship ....................................... 335 F. The Analogy Between the Web of Law and the Physics L iterature N etw ork ................................................................................... 336 II. CONSEQUENCES, APPLICATIONS, AND FUTURE RESEARCH .................................. 341 A. Is the Web of Law a Small World? ...................................................... 343 B . L egal C lusters .......................................................................................... 345 * Professor of Law, University of San Diego. Special thanks to LexisNexis without whose very generous help and skills this article would not have been possible. Jane W. Morris, Director, Customer Programs, and Mike Colangelo, Senior Software Engineer, both of LexisNexis, made the empirical part of this project possible with their invaluable assistance. I am also grateful to Professor Kwan-Liu Ma and Michael Ogawa of the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, and Tim Yost, Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis, for their ongoing work on the visualization dimension of this project. Thanks to Larry Solum for many helpful comments and encouragement, and to Bob Hillman for his suggestions and tough questions. Thanks to Albert-Lszl6 Barabdsi, Michael Rappaport, Ethan Katch, Laurence Lessig, Judge Richard A. Posner, David Post, Brett McDonald, Lior Strahilevitz, and Cosma Shaliz for useful comments. The opinions, inventions, conjectures, and conclusions, as well as any errors in this article, are solely the author's own and not those of LexisNexis or any of those who provided suggestions or comments. This article is dedicated to TI. © 2004-05 Thomas A. Smith.

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