cjeu_citations — Court of Justice of the EU case citations (1954-2018)

Description

A directed network of citations between the decisions (judgments and orders) of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), compiled by K. Moodley and P. Hernandez-Serrano (Institute of Data Science, Maastricht University) from the decisions published on EUR-Lex, the portal of EU law, until December 2018, for a study of the similarity and relevance of court decisions.

Each node is a decision, identified by its CELEX number (e.g. 61997CJ0147), and a directed edge from A to B means that decision A cites decision B (as recorded by EUR-Lex). The nodes are the 13,780 decisions with metadata in the dataset, and the 543 cited decisions without metadata (which have empty attributes). A few decisions (82) cite themselves (self-loops).

The data were released in two versions on Zenodo, with the same citations: the first (used here) also contains the metadata and the subject topics of the decisions, which the second leaves out. The full texts of the decisions (also in the dataset) are not included, and neither are the columns of the metadata derived from the others (year and month of the dates, duration of the case, number of countries, country and chamber combined, and the number of main subjects).

The network has the following properties:

(Node) celex: the CELEX number of the decision (the document identifier of EUR-Lex).
(Node) has_metadata: whether the decision has metadata in the dataset.
(Node) case_label: the case number (e.g. Case C-32/95 P, Joined cases C-147/97 and C-148/97).
(Node) ecli: the European Case Law Identifier (e.g. EU:C:2000:74).
(Node) case_type: Judgement or Order (empty if not specified).
(Node) judge: the judge-rapporteur; advocate: the advocate general.
(Node) country: the country of origin of the case (e.g. of the court that asked for a preliminary ruling).
(Node) chamber: the formation of the Court (e.g. Sixth Chamber; empty if not specified).
(Node) lodge_date, document_date: the dates on which the case was lodged and the decision was issued (YYYY-MM-DD).
(Node) joined_cases: the number of joined cases decided.
(Node) ruling_title, ruling_name, ruling_type, ruling_content: the title of the decision, the names of the parties, the type of proceedings (e.g. reference for a preliminary ruling by a given court), and the keywords of its subject matter.
(Node) topics: the subject matters of the decision in EUR-Lex (e.g. Free movement of goods, Competition).

Tags

Informational Citation Legal Unweighted Metadata

Added

2026-10-31

Citation

K. Moodley, P. V. Hernandez Serrano, G. van Dijck, M. Dumontier, "Similarity and Relevance of Court Decisions: A Computational Study on CJEU Cases." Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2019), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (2019) 10.3233/FAIA190307 Sci-Hub
K. Moodley, P. Hernandez-Serrano, "Court of Justice of the EU case citations and full texts." Zenodo (2020) 10.5281/zenodo.3912042 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3912042
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3926736

Upstream license

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later), https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

Networks

Tip: hover over a column header for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
cjeu_citations	14,323	43,780	3.06	7.48	21.47	33.82	0.14	0.10	15	0.83	Directed	Unipartite	celex has_metadata case_label ecli case_type judge advocate country chamber lodge_date document_date ruling_title ruling_name ruling_type ruling_content joined_cases topics		1.3 MiB	1.7 MiB	1.6 MiB	2.3 MiB

Ridiculograms^*

^* These are automatically generated force-directed visualizations, and can be quite meaningless for networks both big and small. They should not be taken seriously as sources of scientific insight. See here for a discussion.