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Law in Order: An Open Legal Citation Network for New Zealand

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Data Science and Machine Learning (AusDM 2023)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1943))

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Abstract

The potential of leveraging network science in the area of law has long been advocated and highlighted through case and legislation networks. Yet this particular subdomain of data management and information retrieval is still heavily underutilised in both practice and research. One of the contributing factors to this problem is the lack of openly available legal data. This paper describes the development of a legal citation network for New Zealand. In contrast to traditional case citation networks, this data repository also includes legislation and court data. Our network provides the data and references from over 300,000 decisions, 10,000 legislations and 115 courts from all levels of jurisdiction. Additionally, we present exemplifying network analysis results to reveal previously hidden information about the New Zealand legal system and to motivate future research in this domain.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract.

  2. 2.

    Please contact tobias.milz@pg.canterbury.ac.nz to gain access to the data.

  3. 3.

    It shall be noted that we will adjust our terminology for this section and refer to vertices and edges as “nodes” and “relationships”. This is to be consistent with the naming convention provided by Neo4j.

  4. 4.

    In this section we consider the Neo4j graph as a network and adapt the appropriate terminology.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the New Zealand Legal Information Institute (NZLII) for allowing us to use, process and provide their data and would like to acknowledge their contribution to this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 8041, New Zealand

    Tobias Milz, Elizabeth Macpherson & Varvara Vetrova

Authors
  1. Tobias Milz
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  2. Elizabeth Macpherson
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  3. Varvara Vetrova
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tobias Milz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Diana Benavides-Prado

  2. The University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia

    Sarah Erfani

  3. Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China

    Philippe Fournier-Viger

  4. RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Yee Ling Boo

  5. The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Yun Sing Koh

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Milz, T., Macpherson, E., Vetrova, V. (2024). Law in Order: An Open Legal Citation Network for New Zealand. In: Benavides-Prado, D., Erfani, S., Fournier-Viger, P., Boo, Y.L., Koh, Y.S. (eds) Data Science and Machine Learning. AusDM 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1943. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8696-5_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8696-5_15

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-8696-5

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