Cross & Smith on Network Analysis of the Impact of the "Reagan Revolution"

Frank Cross (Texas) and Tom Smith (San Diego) have posted The Reagan Revolution in the Network of Law on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

This paper analyzes the effect of the Rehnquist Court on Supreme Court precedent, using a network of all Court citations to other Supreme Court cases. Network analysis enables a study of the Court's use of precedent that may not be readily visible. We find that the Rehnquist Court has made a dramatic alteration in the network of precedent and, in the process, set the stage for a potentially revolutionary change in the makeup of the law.

And a bit more from conclusion of the paper:

The evidence from the network of Supreme Court decisions reveals a distinct effect of the Reagan Revolution in the Rehnquist Court. The court disrupted the network of precedents that had built up over decades. From our broader view of the forest, the precise implications of this disruption cannot be determined from this data; that would take a finer grained analysis that examined the fate of individual cases (trees). The fact that the effect of the Court shows up much more clearly in the network of law than in casual observation of particular decisions suggests that the Court was laying a foundation for long range change in the law, not trying to remake it overnight. This is consistent with research indicating that the law moves incrementally, via marginal adjustments. Changing the background legal network may be predicate for setting the path of law in the future, though the significance of those changes may not be immediately obvious. By this measure, the Reagan Revolution appears to have succeeded.

To have ultimate effect, however, the foundation must be built upon. A detailed study of prison reform litigation thus found that legal change happened gradually, as precedents slowly and steadily accumulated. That study concluded that “doctrine constrains as one element in a dynamic, interacting process; the need to maintain contact with existing doctrine, to stretch it without snapping it, is one of several conditions for effective judicial policy making.” The Rehnquist Court’s stretching and restructuring of the preexisting network of precedent may have established the basis for future courts of similar alignment to alter the content of the law to a greater degree than did the Rehnquist Court itself.

Highly recommended.  If you haven't yet read a paper that uses "network analysis," to examine citation networks, this is a good one to start with.  This is an important technique and as Cross and Smith show, it allows us to see familiar facts in new ways.  Download it while its hot!