Combining topic modelling and citation network analysis to study case
  law from the European Court on Human Rights on the right to respect for
  private and family life
M. Mohammadi L. M. Bruijn M. Wieling M. Vols
As legal case law databases such as HUDOC continue to grow rapidly, it has
become essential for legal researchers to find efficient methods to handle such
large-scale data sets. Such case law databases usually consist of the textual
content of cases together with the citations between them. This paper focuses
on case law from the European Court of Human Rights on Article 8 of the
European Convention of Human Rights, the right to respect private and family
life, home and correspondence. In this study, we demonstrate and compare the
potential of topic modelling and citation network to find and organize case law
on Article 8 based on their general themes and citation patterns, respectively.
Additionally, we explore whether combining these two techniques leads to better
results compared to the application of only one of the methods. We evaluate the
effectiveness of the combined method on a unique manually collected and
annotated dataset of Aricle 8 case law on evictions. The results of our
experiments show that our combined (text and citation-based) approach provides
the best results in finding and grouping case law, providing scholars with an
effective way to extract and analyse relevant cases on a specific issue.