The Case Law of the Italian Constitutional Court between Network Theory and Philosophy of Information

• Autore: Tommaso Agnoloni - Ugo Pagallo
• Carica: Researcher at the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques ITTIG, CNR - Full professor of Philosophy of Law at Turin Law School, University of Turin.
• Pagine: 139-151

The Case Law of the Italian Constitutional Court

between Network Theory and Philosophy of Information

TOMM ASO AGN OLO NI, UG O PAGAL LO∗

SUMM ARY:1. Introduction – 2. Constr uction of the Constitutional Case Law Citation

Network – 3. Legal Networks and Their Information – 3.1. Paradigm Shifts – 3.2.

Legal Transplants – 4. Conclusions

1. INT RODU CTI ON

Over the past decade work on network analysis and the law has become

increasingly popular among scholars. This research includes (not only but

also) jurisprudence, legislation and how academic studies quote each other.

Here, focus is on the case law of the Italian Constitutional Court and its own

citation network. Sect. 2 explains how we built this latter network, so as to

illustrate some of its most relevant properties. Sect. 3 deepens these results

in terms of information. By distinguishing three levels of analysis, i.e. legal

information “for” reality, “as” reality, and “about” reality, special attention

is drawn to matters of knowledge and concepts that inform us about the dif-

ferent states of the world and frame the representation and function of the

legal system which is under scrutiny. The conclusions indicate the next steps

of our research.

2. CON STRUCTI ON OF THE CO NST ITU TIO NAL CA SE LAW CITATI ON

NETWORK

In 2013 the Italian Constitutional Court released as open data the com-

plete datasets of the rulings it has delivered from its origin in 1956 onwards.

According tothe open data principles, data are released in open format (XML)

and with an open license (CC-BY-SA-3.0). Documents are annotated with a

rich set of machine readable metadata of different nature (bibliographic, tem-

poral, semantic, legal). Furthermore, the availability of the entire documen-

tal corpus allows the application in bulk of processing tools to plain texts for

additional information extraction and dataset enrichment.

∗T. Agnoloni is researcherat the Ins tituteof Legal Information Theor y and Techniques

ITTIG - CNR. U. Pagallo is full professor of Philosophyof Law at Turin Law School, Uni-

versity of Turin.

Edizioni Scientif‌iche Italiane ISSN 0390-0975