Why some judgments matter more than others

01The question

Citation counts flatten where a judgment sits in the wider network of case law. The paper tests when composite centrality measures do better than their parts, across 66 subnetworks of European Court of Human Rights citations, against two different definitions of importance.

02What we found

Degree plus eigenvector centrality beat its components in 45 of 66 networks against one ground truth and 43 against the other. The best weighting moved from 0.30 to 0.35 between them, which is the point: what counts as central depends on what you decide importance means.

Prioritising lower-relevance cases helped in 1 of 18 comparisons; prioritising higher-relevance cases helped in 17.

03Built to be rerun

The repository can rebuild the citation networks from the raw metadata, but the paper’s analyses start from fixed, centrality-enriched inputs, so every table and figure regenerates in minutes. Each number in the paper is mapped to the script and the output file that produce it.

04Limits

Centrality does not produce an objective ranking of legal importance. The result depends on how the network is built, which ground truth is used, which measures are combined and where the threshold sits. The contribution is an inspectable account of how those choices move judgments from the edge to the centre.