Senior researcher of the Institute Zsolt Ződi published an article (in Hungarian) in the Law Working Paper series of the Center for Social Sciences Legal Studies Institute. The paper analyses with simple network methods the internal citations within the 9000 judgements delivered by the Hungarian Constitutional Court between 1990 and 2017.
This network is very much similar to other citation networks of different courts across the world: it is a scale free, where a small group of important judgements gets the vast majority of the citations. The paper attempts to tackle what is the driving force behind this phenomena – the preferential attachment – in the legal domain, and in the citation practice of the Constitutional Court.
Time series analysis of the citation data shows, that a serious rearrangement process has been started from 2012 in the citation network. Previously important hubs are losing importance and new hubs are emerging. However the 2012 and 2017 period was too short to change the basic mathematical features of the entire network.
In the second part of the paper a sub-graph, the network of freedom of speech decisions is analyzed. The main features of this smaller network is very much similar to the bigger one: this is also scale-free, and there is a rearrangement within it after 2012.