Continuity and change in US legal tradition: Evidence from judicial citation communities.

Authors

Elliott Ash, Caterina Chiopris, Robert Mahari, Suresh Naidu

Published in

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Volume 123. Issue 30. Pages e2509763123. Jul 28, 2026. Epub Jul 20, 2026.

Abstract

Legal doctrine is often described as evolving case by case while preserving coherent legal traditions. We introduce a method for identifying and tracing such traditions by applying the Louvain community-detection algorithm to the complete U.S. federal judicial citation graph (1790-2024; 760,000 opinions linked by 8.3 million citations). The resulting citation communities are unsupervised, blind to court labels and topical taxonomies, yet they form meaningful empirical groupings: In validation exercises, they recover known institutional structure and capture coherent substantive and procedural approaches to law. Using these communities as empirical units, we study how legal traditions evolve and respond to legislative change. We show that the introduction of pivotal federal statutes shifts citation patterns toward newer precedent, indicating that legislation can disrupt established traditions and redirect the development of case law.

PMID:
42475562
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 21 Jul 2026.

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