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09 Nov 09

SSRN-Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary by Daniel Katz, Derek Stafford

"Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. As part of a larger effort to develop a fully integrated model of judicial decision making, we argue that social structure-operationalized as the professional and social connections between judicial actors-partially directs outcomes in the hierarchical federal judiciary.

Since different social structures impose dissimilar consequences upon outputs, the precursor to evaluating the doctrinal consequences that a given social structure imposes is a descriptive effort to characterize its properties. Given the difficulty associated with obtaining appropriate data for federal judges, it is necessary to rely upon a proxy measure to paint a picture of the social landscape. In the aggregate, we believe the flow of law clerks reflects a reasonable proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists. Having collected available information for all federal judicial law clerks employed by an Article III judge during the "natural" Rehnquist Court (1995-2004), we use these roughly 19,000 clerk events to craft a series of network based visualizations.

Using network analysis, our visualizations and subsequent analytics provide insight into the path of peer effects in the federal judiciary. For example, we find the distribution of "degrees" is highly skewed implying the social structure is dictated by a small number of socially prominent actors. Using a variety of centrality measures, we identify these socially prominent jurists. Next, we draw from the extant complexity literature and offer a possible generative process responsible for producing such inequality in social authority. While the complete adjudication of a generative process is beyond the scope of this article, our results contribute to a growing literature documenting the highly-skewed distribution of authority across the common law and its constitutive institutions. "

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law sociology judges networks socio-legal organizations

02 Jul 09

pajek [Pajek Wiki]

Pajek (Slovene word for Spider) is a program, for Windows, for analysis and visualization of large networks. It is freely available, for noncommercial use, at its download page. See also a reference manual for Pajek (in PDF). The development of Pajek is t

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Bookmarks sociology research networks web

LexiURL Searcher

LexiURL Searcher is a program to conduct automatic analyses of the impact of collections of documents or web sites, or to create network diagrams of collections of web sites. It has the ability to automatically submit queries to search engines and process

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Bookmarks research sociology networks web

SocSciBot: Link crawler for the social sciences

SocSciBot is a Web site crawler designed for link analysis research. It can be used to conduct link analysis on a single site or collection of sites, or to run a search engine on a collection of sites. It can also be used in teaching, to illustrate how li

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Bookmarks web research tools networks

10 Feb 09

LittleSis » Profiling the powers that be

An involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited and maintained by people like you.

littlesis.org/start - Preview

Bookmarks politics reference wiki government research networks

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