Finding Relevant Indian Judgments using Dispersion of Citation Network

Abstract

We construct a complex citation network of a subset of Indian Constitutional Articles and the legal judgments that invoke them. We describe, how this dataset is constructed and also introduce the term of dispersion from network science related to social networks, in the context of legal relevance. Our research shows that dispersion is a decisive structural feature to show the importance of relevant legal judgments and landmark decisions. Our method provides similarity information about the document in question, which otherwise remains undetected by standard citation metrics.