Quantifying long-term impact of court decisions

Abstract

In this work, we investigate how court decisions aggregate citations in the European Court of Human Rights. Using the Bass model, we quantify the prevalence of the rich-get-richer phenomenon. We find that the Bass model provides an excellent description of how individual decisions accumulate citations. Our analysis reveals that citations to a large fraction of decisions are, in fact, explained by the rich-get-richer phenomenon. Based on our statistical model, we argue that network properties are insufficient to explain the rich-get-richer effect, suggesting that intrinsic properties of decisions drive a significant part of the observed citation patterns. We conclude by discussing the legal implications of our findings.