Alschner, Wolfgang; Vanessa MacDonnell, and Carissima Mathen (eds). 2024. Decoding the Court: Legal Data Insights from the Supreme Court of Canada. Routledge. Open-access version at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003279112. Edited collection combining legal data analytics with doctrinal analysis to study the Supreme Court of Canada.  

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Bennardo, Kevin & Alexa Z Chew. 2019. “Citation Stickiness.” Journal of Appellate Practice and Process 20:1, 61–121; repub’d in Legal Writing Institute Monograph Series, vol 13: Examining Legal Writing Empirically, at https://www.lwionline.org/article/citation-stickiness. An empirical study of “citation stickiness,” with a citation defined as sticky if it appears in one of the parties’ briefs and then again in the court’s opinion. On analyzing 325 cases decided by US federal courts of appeals (a sample of 25 from each of the 13 appellate court circuits), the authors found that of the 7552 cases cited in those opinions, more than half were never mentioned in the parties’ briefs. From the perspective of the brief, only 16% of the cases cited in the parties’ briefs later appear in the resulting opinions, and only 38% of the cases cited by both parties later appeared in the resulting opinions. In other words, even a case that both parties deemed relevant still had a 62% likelihood of not being mentioned by the court, a figure that the authors find surprising.  

 

Black, Vaughan & Nicholas Richter. 1993. “Did She Mention My Name?: Citation of Academic Authority by the Supreme Court of Canada, 1985–1990.” Dalhousie Law Journal 16:2, 377–394. https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/dlj/vol16/iss2/3/. For each of the Court’s decisions from 1985–90 inclusive, the authors compiled a database of 620 cases comprising 993 separate judgments. Data included information about which academic authorities were cited in each judgment, about whether a decision was unanimous or non-unanimous, about whether the judgment involved the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and whether it involved Qu6bec’s Civil Code. Study results are shown in tabular format and discussed in the article. 

 

Campagnolo, Yan and Camille Andrzejewski. 2022. “The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time by the Supreme Court of Canada.” Alberta Law Review 60:1, 129-168. https://doi.org/10.29173/alr2713. Presents the methods most commonly used to measure the impact of scholarly works (the periodical citation method, the judicial citation method, and the peer rating method) and to determine which law reviews and articles the Supreme Court of Canada has cited most since its creation.  

Fournier, Mireille. “Quebec Talks Back: nouvelles pratiques linguistiques à la Cour d’appel du Québec” (2021) 66:4 McGill LJ 603–634. https://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1089947ar or https://lawjournal.mcgill.ca/article/quebec-talks-back-nouvelles-pratiques-linguistiques-a-la-cour-dappel-du-quebec/. Shows how judges of the Quebec Court of Appeal have contributed to a Quebec and a Canadian conversation through the evolution of linguistic practices to promoted Quebec jurisprudence. The article also reveals some of the discourses and prejudices that underly the reception of Quebec case law outside the province. See especially the comparative citation tables at pp 623–626. 

 

Fournier, Mireille. “Ontario, Listen Up: Citational Practices in the Ontario Court of Appeal” (2023) (101) Can Bar Rev 613-644. https://cbr.cba.org/index.php/cbr/article/view/4877. Building on methodologies developed in an earlier article (Fournier, 2021), the author shows that while Ontario’s Court of Appeal is the most cited among Canadian provincial appeal courts, it engages less with its provincial counterparts’ jurisprudence than those courts do—even in areas of federal (i.e., pan-Canadian) law such as aboriginal law, bankruptcy law and criminal law. See the tables at pp 621–622, 625–626, 637–641. 

Kleefeld, John C. “The Immortal Snail’s Global Reach: Introducing the Donoghue v Stevenson Citation Project” in Donoghue v Stevenson—The Immortal Snail—90th Anniversary Conference Papers (Vancouver: Continuing Legal Education Society of British Columbia, 2022) 18-1–18-17. https://www.cle.bc.ca/donoghue-v-stevenson-90th-anniversary/. This is the earliest publication of the Donoghue v Stevenson Citation Project, presented on 26 May 2022 at the global virtual conference commemorating Donoghue v Stevenson. 

 

Jobin, Pierre-Gabriel. “Les réactions de la doctrine à la création du droit civil québécois par les juges - les débuts d’une affaire de famille” (1980) 21 Cahiers de Droit 257–275. https://doi.org/10.7202/042384ar. Studies relations between legal writers and judges in the Quebec legal system at the crossroads of civil and common law. A table (p 270) summarizes 392 citations in 76 judgments, grouping them by legal concept (e.g., abus du droit, clause restrictive) and source (e.g., Quebec decisions, French doctrinal writing, common-law decisions). 

 

Kosma, Montgomery N. “Measuring the Influence of Supreme Court Justices.” (1998) 27(2) The Journal of Legal Studies 333–372. https://doi.org/10.1086/468023. Aims to measure the influence of 99 retired US Supreme Court justices, analyzing over 1.2 million citations to the Court’s opinions written between 1793 and 1991. Treats a justice’s appointment as a capital investment and the justice’s output as the opinions generated each term, using citations as a proxy for an opinion’s value. 

Landes, William M, Lawrence Lessig, and Michael E Solimine. “Judicial Influence: A Citation Analysis of Federal Courts of Appeals Judges.” (1998) 27(2) The Journal of Legal Studies 271–332. https://doi.org/10.1086/468022. Estimates the influence of federal appeals court judges with at least six years of tenure. Ranking is based on both total influence (citations adjusted for judicial tenure and other variables) and average influence (citations per published opinion). Also analyzes the effects of factors potentially relevant to explaining differences in influence, including characteristics of the judges and of the circuit in which they sit. An appendix uses citations to the published opinions in each circuit to measure the influence of circuits rather than individual judges. 

 

Lyke, Sheldon Bernard. “Brown Abroad: An Empirical Analysis of Foreign Judicial Citation and the Metaphor of Cosmopolitan Conversation.” (2012) 45(1) Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 83–144. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hx8d0r0. Analyzes a dataset of foreign judicial citations to the 1954 landmark decision of the US Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education. Concludes that this citation practice can be seen as a form of “cosmopolitan conversation” leading to forms of legal learning and innovation as courts have cited, interpreted, and infused their own meaning into the Brown decision. 

 

Neale, Thom. “Citation Analysis of Canadian Case Law.” (2013) 1(1) Journal of Open Access to Law 1–60. https://ojs.law.cornell.edu/index.php/joal/article/view/20. Uses a corpus of 594,540 Canadian court opinions supplied by the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) to analyze time-series network rankings for each case. The methodology aims to determine: (ii) the age at which cases in the network typically cease to be important (where importance is defined as a positively trending pattern of citation for a period of at least 15 years); and (ii) the characteristics that define those cases that continue to be important despite the passage of time. The analysis suggests that cases typically cease to be cited in 3 to 15 years, depending on the jurisdiction, except for Supreme Court of Canada decisions, which persist for an average of 50 years. 

 

Ogden, Patti J. “’Mastering the Lawless Science of Our Law’: A Story of Legal Citation Indexes” (1979) 85 Law Libr J 1–48. https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/118/. Gives an account of the first citation index, examines factors leading to the development of legal citation indexes and the rise of the modern legal citator, considers the citator’s impact, and discusses its future. 

 

Ruhl, JB, Daniel Martin Katz, and Michael J Bommarito II. “Harnessing legal complexity: Bring tools of complexity science to bear on improving law” (2017) 355(6332) Science 1377–1378. https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1126/science.aag3013. Argues for application of complex adaptive systems (CAS) science to legal systems to reveal trends and help make informed policy choices. Summarizes a network analysis of US Supreme Court citations to reveal a transition from jurisprudential reliance on foreign law to domestic law following the War of 1812. 

 

Warchuk, Paul. “Do Pre-1970 Precedents Still Matter? An Empirical Analysis of Legal Submissions and Court Decisions” (23 December 2024) https://ssrn.com/abstract=5069077. Studies the relevance of pre-1970 Supreme Court of Canada cases through several quantitative analyses of citation patterns in Supreme Court decisions, factums and lower court decisions. These analyses reveal that although pre-1970 decisions represent only 2-3% of total citations, they consistently influence Canadian jurisprudence. Between 2015-2024, over 30% of Supreme Court decisions and 23% of factums cited at least one pre-1970 precedent. The Court also cited its pre-1970 decisions more often than it cited most other courts of appeal. Pre-1970 decisions are especially resilient in private law and show a slower decay rate than more recent cases. 

 

Weinshall, Keren and Lee Epstein. “Developing High-Quality Data Infrastructure for Legal Analytics: Introducing the Israeli Supreme Court Database” (2020) 17(2) Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 416–434. https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12250. Argues that the design of data infrastructure for analyzing judges and courts has not kept pace with interest in that topic. Recommends that such design adhere to a universal set of principles; namely, that the tool is: (i) aimed at solving or developing implications for real-world problems; ii) open and accessible; (iii) reproducible and reliable; (iv) sustainable and updatable; and (v) built to serve as a foundation for present and future research needs. The authors describe how they have attempted to implement these principles by encoding information from the final decisions of all 16,109 panel cases opened by the Supreme Court of Israel between 2010 and 2018.