Network, Visualization, Analytics. A Tool Allowing Legal Scholars to Experimentally Investigate EU Case Law

Abstract

Legal Informatics has recently witnessed a growing interest towards the insights offered by the intersection among Network Analysis (NA), visualization techniques and legal science research questions. Also thanks to several seminal works, the field is ready to tackle new challenges at a theoretical and application level. The first is to bring the network approach into “genuinely legal” research questions. The second is to create tools allowing legal scholars without technical skills to exploit NA with two goals: (i) make experiments with NA and push new ideas both in legal and NA science; (ii) use NA and visualization in their daily activities (e.g., legal analysis and information retrieval). Against this backdrop, a truly interdisciplinary approach deeply involving legal experts/scholars is needed. The paper presents an ongoing research project - EUCaseNet - dealing with these challenges and aiming to explore the potentialities of NA in supporting the study of EU case law.