Alschner, Wolfgang, Vanessa MacDonnell, and Carissima Mathen, eds. Decoding the Court: Legal Data Insights from the Supreme Court of

Canada. Routledge, 2024. 

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This edited collection combines legal data analytics with doctrinal analysis to study the Supreme Court of Canada. After providing a bird’s-eye view of the Court, contributors consider the Court’s increasing references to the separation of powers (executive, legislative and judicial), followed by a network citation analysis of precedential archetypes (Part 1, chapters 1–3). Discussions follow on how the Court’s judges navigate disagreement (analyzing both concurrences and dissents) and the role of bilingualism, based on a quantitative analysis of citations to English, French, and bilingual doctrinal sources (books, law review articles, and governmental reports) (Part 2, chapters 4–5). The collection concludes with an introduction to the Supreme Court of Canada Leave Project, a database and machine learning algorithm for predicting the likelihood of cases getting leave to the Supreme Court, as well as a consideration of how mainstreamed judicial analytics might influence the appointment process for Supreme Court judges, the adjudication of cases at the Court, and the ability of the public—and the Court itself—to appraise trends and tendencies in the Court’s judicial decision-making (Part 3, chapters 6–7). 

 

Baumgartner, Martin. “Lost in Citation: How to Reference the UN Charter and the ICJ Statute.” Opinio Juris (blog). 29 August 2023.  

 

The author concludes that the Charter of the United Nations has been commonly cited incorrectly since about 1980; the Statute of the International Court of Justice, since 1998. He attempts to explain why and proposes alternate citations for both texts. 

 

Bennardo, Kevin & Alexa Z Chew. “Citation Stickiness.” Journal of Appellate Practice and Process 20, no. 1 (2019): 61–121. Reprinted in Legal

Writing Institute Monograph Series, vol. 13, Examining Legal Writing Empirically. 

 

The authors study “citation stickiness,” with a citation defined as “sticky” if it appears in a party’s brief and then again in the court’s opinion. On analyzing 325 cases decided by US federal courts of appeals, the authors found that of the 7,552 cases cited in those opinions, more than half were never mentioned in the parties’ briefs. From the perspective of the brief, only 16 percent of the cases cited in the parties’ briefs later appear in the resulting opinions, and only 38 percent 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 percent likelihood of not being mentioned by the court, a figure that the authors find surprisingly high. 

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Black, Vaughan & Nicholas Richter. “Did She Mention My Name?: Citation of Academic Authority by the Supreme Court of Canada, 1985–

1990.” Dalhousie Law Journal 16, no. 2 (1993): 377–394. 

 

For each of the Court’s decisions from 1985–90, the authors compiled a database of 620 cases comprising 993 separate judgments. Data included information about academic authorities 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 Quebec’s Civil Code. Study results are discussed and shown in tabular format.  

 

Caldeira, Gregory A. “The Transmission of Legal Precedent: A Study of State Supreme Courts.” American Political Science Review 79, no. 1

(1985): 178–94. 

 

The author attempts to uncover citation patterns among US state supreme courts and to evaluate alternative explanations for them, including distance between courts; similarity of political culture; the prestige, professionalism, legal capital, and caseload of the cited court; the social diversity of the environment; differentials between courts on several dimensions; and presence in the same legal reporting region. The results indicate the importance of legal reporting districts, distance between the courts, cultural linkages between jurisdictions and, especially, characteristics of the cited court. 

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Campagnolo, Yan and Camille Andrzejewski. “The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time by the Supreme Court of Canada.” Alberta

Law Review 60, no. 1 (2022), 129-168. 

 

The authors present the methods most commonly used to measure the impact of scholarly works (periodical citation, judicial citation, and peer rating) and determine which law reviews and articles the Supreme Court of Canada has cited most.  

 

Charlotin, Damien. “‘Authorities’ in International Dispute Settlement: A Data Analysis.” PhD diss, University of Cambridge, 2020. 

 

International litigation and arbitration heavily rely on the use of “authorities” such as precedents and publicist teachings. This practice has significant implications for international law, but there is limited research on the practice of citing authorities in international disputes. The author uses data-led analyses to investigate the authoritativeness of authorities and identify differences in citation practices among different protagonists. The dataset collected includes nearly 200,000 citations from over 7,000 documents, providing a blueprint for future empirical research in international dispute settlement. 

 

Craighead, Burke M. “The Bluebook: An Insider’s Perspective.” Michigan Law Review 124 (forthcoming 2026). 

 

The Bluebook, a resource for legal citation that has drawn a lot of criticism, has been attacked for its institutional flaws and failure to address more significant concerns. The review contends that cultural concerns regarding the goal of legal academia and fundamental challenges in legal education are the root causes of the problems. 

 

Fournier, Mireille. “Quebec Talks Back: nouvelles pratiques linguistiques à la Cour d’appel du Québec.” McGill Law Journal 66, no. 4 (2021):

603–634. 

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The author shows how Quebec appellate judges have contributed to a Quebec and a Canadian conversation through the evolution of linguistic practices to promote 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.” Canadian Bar Review 101 (2023): 613-644. 

 

Building on methodologies developed in her previous 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 federal (i.e., pan-Canadian) fields such as aboriginal law, bankruptcy law and criminal law. See the tables at pp. 621–622, 625–626, 637–641. 

 

Friedman, Lawrence M. et al. “State Supreme Courts: A Century of Style and Citation.” Stanford Law Review 33 (1981): 773–818. 

 

The authors analyze changes in US court opinions, using quantitative information to indicate judicial style shifts from 1870 to 1970. They draw on a 5900-case sample cases from 16 state supreme courts to present findings about opinion length, dissents and concurrences, and citation patterns. They also explore interstate differences, aiming to shed light on the possible determinants of changes over time. 

 

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.”

Cahiers de Droit 21, no. 2 (1980): 257–275. https://doi.org/10.7202/042384ar. 

 

The author 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). 

 

Johnson, Charles A. “Follow-Up Citations in the U.S. Supreme Court.” Western Political Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1986): 538-547. 

 

The author examines how often and why the US Supreme Court cites its own decisions in subsequent cases—a phenomenon he calls “follow-up citations.” Analyzing citations to 170 cases decided between 1946 and 1963, he identifies patterns in how precedent is reaffirmed, distinguished, or overturned. The study finds that follow-up citations are more common when earlier decisions involved constitutional questions, dissents, or closely divided opinions. The conclusion is that justices cite not only to invoke legal authority but also to signal continuity or departure in doctrinal development. The author finds it troubling, though, that the overwhelming number of citations had no clear substantive treatment in the majority opinion: less than one-third of all cited cases showed a positive or negative treatment, and a substantial number were part of string citations. The author concludes that this finding should give pause to counting citations without regard to their treatment of or relevance to the majority opinion. 

 

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. Continuing Legal Education Society of British Columbia, 2022. 

 

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. The chapter includes scatter plots, cumulative citation curves, and other data visualizations based on the global judicial citations to Donoghue v Stevenson gathered in time for the conference. 

 

Kleefeld, John C. “Review of OSCOLA, the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities.” The Dalhousie Law Journal 36, no. 1 (2013):

269–280. 

 

The author posits that with the fourth edition of OSCOLA, the “Oscolites” have issued a four-pronged challenge to other contenders in the world of legal citation. The first prong aims at the “hegemony of uniformity.” The second, at a tendency to what Posner has declaimed as “hypertrophy” in the size of legal citation manuals. The third, at barriers to accessing such manuals. And the fourth prong, gentler and more tentative, at the notion that footnoting and referencing legal materials is purely a functional question, with little role for beauty, elegance, or style—such considerations being reserved, if at all, for the main body of legal texts in which the citations appear. 

 

Kosma, Montgomery N. “Measuring the Influence of Supreme Court Justices.” The Journal of Legal Studies 27, no. 2 (1998): 333–372. 

 

Aiming to measure the influence of 99 retired US Supreme Court justices, the author analyzes over 1.2 million citations to the Court’s opinions written between 1793 and 1991. The methodology 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, Willam M. and Richard A. Posner. “Legal Precedent: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis.” Journal of Law and Economics 19 (1976):

249-307. 

 

In this influential early article that helped lay the foundation for subsequent law-and-economics scholarship on judicial behaviour and precedent, the authors propose treating judicial opinions as durable goods that lower the cost of future adjudication. Viewed thus, opinions in prior periods are a capital stock that yields a flow of information that depreciates over time as new conditions arise, with new (and replacement) capital created by investment in the production of new precedents. The model predicts that judges are more likely to follow precedents that were decided by a higher court, that were more recent, or that involved similar facts. To test the model, the authors conduct an empirical analysis of citations in a sampling of the opinions of the US Courts of Appeals and the US Supreme Court. Their findings broadly support the theory, suggesting that judicial citation practices are shaped in part by rational cost-benefit considerations. Extensive tabular data is presented throughout the article and its appendices. 

 

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 27, no. 2 (1998): 271–332. 

 

The authors estimate the influence of federal appeals court judges with at least six years of tenure. Ranking is based on total influence (citations adjusted for judicial tenure and other variables) and average influence (citations per published opinion). The study 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.” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 45, no. 1 (2012): 83–144. 

 

The author analyzes a dataset of foreign judicial citations to the 1954 landmark decision of the US Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education. He 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. 

 

McCormick, Peter. “The Supreme Court Cites the Supreme Court: Follow-Up Citation on the Supreme Court of Canada, 1989-1993.”

Osgoode Hall Law Journal 33, no. 3 (1995): 453-486. 

 

After considering the reasons that judges choose to cite (or choose not to cite) authorities, the author examines citation practices of the Supreme Court of Canada by focusing on its references to its own earlier decisions—adopting the term “follow-up citations” coined by Johnson (supra, 1986). The study analyzes all 631 cases in the Supreme Court Reports for the years 1989 through 1993. The 4,848 follow-up citations generated from this data embrace 1,346 different prior decisions of the Court, meaning that the average Supreme Court case was cited 3.6 times. Tables include those showing the most frequently cited judges (p. 464); frequency of self-citation (p. 466); frequency by age of citation (p. 469); “influence scores” whereby citations more remote in time have greater weight (p. 471); frequency of “named” citations—that is, citations in which the citing judge is named (p. 473); and revised “influence scores” that account for named citations (p. 475). The study also examines citations by case type (Charter, public, criminal, private) and age (average age, median age, decay rate, half-life) (p. 479). The author concludes by noting the high drop-off rates for citation frequencies over time, both for individual cases and individual members of the Court—though also noting that the sui generis impact of the early Charter decisions in the study period suggests that these inferences cannot necessarily be generalized. 

 

Merryman, John Henry. “Toward a Theory of Citations: An Empirical Study of the Citation Practice of the California Supreme Court in 1950,

1960, and 1970.” Southern California Law Review 50, no. 3 (1978): 381-428. 

 

This study reveals patterns in the California Supreme Court’s citation practices that include: (1) stable citation rates in majority opinions; (2) notably fewer citations in dissents and concurrences; (3) a strong preference for citing California courts, especially the Court’s own decisions, over those of other states; (4) fewer citations to other state courts as their relative citation “pool” shrinks; (5) increased citation of US Supreme Court and federal decisions; (6) a short citation “half-life” for California decisions; (7) declining use of sources like the Restatement, encyclopedias, and annotations; (8) rising citation of legal periodicals; (9) divergent preferences among justices in citing secondary sources; and (10) consistent but modest citation of treatises, with variation in which titles are cited. The article suggests that such data-driven studies provide valuable insight into judicial method and could be fruitfully applied to other courts. 

 

Neale, Thom. “Citation Analysis of Canadian Case Law.” Journal of Open Access to Law 1, no. 1 (2013): 1–60. 

 

The author uses a corpus of 594,540 Canadian court opinions from 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 (with importance defined as a positively trending citation pattern for at least 15 years); and (ii) the defining characteristics of 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.” Law Library Journal 85 (1979): 1–48. 

 

The author 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 its impact, and discusses its future. 

 

Paré, Éric. “La demi-vie des jugements.” 13-1 Lex Electronica 13, no. 1 (2008). Reprinted 2008 CanLIIDocs 575. 

 

The author notes that judgments tend to be cited less and less over time, though without ceasing to be cited entirely. The study measures this decline via a judgment’s half-life. By analogy to radioactive decay, where the half-life of a radioactive substance is the time interval at the end of which a quantity of the substance reaches half of its initial value, a judgment can be said to reach its half-life when cited half as often as at its peak. Based on the Canadian judgments studied, the author concludes that the average half-life is between 10 and 15 years, though this measure varies considerably with context. While some judgments maintain relevance for decades due to foundational importance, others decline more quickly due to the emergence of newer precedent or legislative change. The study suggests that in aggregate, only about ten percent of citations refer to judgments older than 20 years. 

 

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 355, no. 6332 (2017): 1377–1378. 

 

The authors argue for application of complex adaptive systems (CAS) science to legal systems to reveal trends and help make informed policy choices. The study 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.” Social Sciences

Research Network (23 December 2024; revised 2 June 2025). 

 

The author 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 percent of total citations, they consistently influence Canadian jurisprudence. Between 2015-2024, over 30 percent of Supreme Court decisions and 23 percent of factums cited at least one pre-1970 precedent. The Court also cited its pre-1970 decisions more often than it cited most other appeal courts. Pre-1970 decisions are found to be 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.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 416–434. 

 

The authors argue that the design of data infrastructure for analyzing judges and courts has not kept pace with interest in that topic. They recommend 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 aimed 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.