Related work, by James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Davis, and Sangick Jeon, a political-science student at the same place, shows how Supreme Court jurisprudence has developed over time. As they report in a recently completed paper, they, too, constructed an electronic network of linked Supreme Court opinions, this time using the majority opinions gathered from about 30,000 cases issued between the late 18th century and today.
Dr Fowler's network treated links between nodes as directional arrows rather than simple lines. He did this by separating opinions into two types: authorities, which are cited by many other cases; and hubs, which cite many other opinions. Using linear algebra to calculate all the cases' authority and hub scores, Dr Fowler arrived at his list of most important cases. He then charted which cases were the most salient at each point in time.
He found that, before the American civil war, the most authoritative cases involved freedom of contract. After the war and until the end of the 1930s, when Roosevelt's New Deal was enacted, these were gradually replaced by cases dealing with the balance of power to regulate commerce between Congress and the states. Finally, around the second world war, as the Supreme Court shifted its focus to civil liberties, the most important cases became those concerning freedom of speech. According to the model, civil rights opinions remain ascendant today.
Dr Fowler's model shows that, until the end of the 18th century, the Supreme Court's opinions rarely cited previous Supreme Court opinions. This is not all that surprising since there were so few. In the 19th century, however, the average number of citations to previous cases started climbing sharply and so did the average number of citations to those cases by later Supreme Courts. For a while, Supreme Court justices liked to cite opinions with many citations in them. By 1950, an average opinion cited about 15 other opinions, and each opinion was itself cited by roughly the same number.
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