Answering Legal Research Questions About Dutch Case Law with Network Analysis and Visualization

he availability of large collections of digitalized legal texts raises an opportunity for new methodologies in legal scholarship. Analysis of citation networks of case law gives insight into which cases are related and to determine their relevance. Software tools that provide an graphical interface to case law networks are required in order to enable non-technical researches to use network analysis methodologies. In this study, we present open source software for the analysis and visualization of networks of Dutch case law, aimed for use by legal scholars. This technology assists in answering legal research questions, including determining relevant precedents, comparing the precedents with those identified in the literature, and determining clusters of related cases. The technology was used to analyze a network of cases related to employer liability