7 research outputs found
Centrality Over Time of CJEU Decisions
Included is the data and the script used in the study published in Mattias DerlĂ©n & Johan Lindholm, 'Measuring Centrality in Legal Citation Networks â A Case Study of the HITS and PageRank Algorithms', Journal of International Economic Law (2017). The dataset contains all 38,261 citations made by the CJEU in its 8,891 decisions issued between 1954 and May 2011 to its own previous case law (edgelist.csv). Included is also the script for R (3.3.1) that we used to calculate the centrality of individual decisions over time. The script includes the code for calculating HubRank, a new centrality measurement introduced in the article
Significant Communities in Large Sparse Networks
Researchers use community-detection algorithms to reveal large-scale organization in biological and social networks, but community detection is useful only if the communities are significant and not a result of noisy data. To assess the statistical significance of the network communities, or the robustness of the detected structure, one approach is to perturb the network structure by removing links and measure how much the communities change. However, perturbing sparse networks is challenging because they are inherently sensitive; they shatter easily if links are removed. Here we propose a simple method to perturb sparse networks and assess the significance of their communities. We generate resampled networks by adding extra links based on local information, then we aggregate the information from multiple resampled networks to find a coarse-grained description of significant clusters. In addition to testing our method on benchmark networks, we use our method on the sparse network of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) case law, to detect significant and insignificant areas of law. We use our significance analysis to draw a map of the ECJ case law network that reveals the relations between the areas of law
Constructing Achievement in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This represents a significant research gap, as the Tribunalâs public discourse (notably its case law and Annual Reports) can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has âirreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian lawâ and lists six specific achievements: âHolding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the lawâ. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of âachievementâ actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY