Why do court opinions list multiple layers of citations? It is common in for courts to cite case law. But why do they cite or note what their citations cite? Here's an example I just came across: National Business Services, Inc. v. Wright, 2 F. Supp. 2d 701 (E.D. Pa. 1998) (citing Albert E. Price, Inc. v. Metzner, 574 F. Supp. 281, 289 (E.D. Pa.1983)) The first citation is to a specific page in a 1998 order from a U.S. District Court. Why parenthetically note how that in turn cites an earlier 1983 order from the same court? It's not like it lends more authority to the primary citation. (Or if it does, then why stop at the second layer of citation? If the 1983 order cited something earlier should it be listed as well?)
This practice varies depending on the court and/or judge's own style preferences and is often a judgment call based on what the author is trying to communicate with a citation. I'll give a few reasons why a judgment might provide multiple layers of citations: because the &quot;deeper&quot; source is a well-used precedent for a particular point, so it is meaningful for readers to know that the shallower source cited the well-accepted leading case on an issue to show that a particular proposition has been long-accepted in a jurisdiction (your example might show that whatever proposition that is being cited has been used in this district over a 25-year period) to show that a decision from a lower-level court is consistent with historical jurisprudence or with higher-level jurisprudence One example: [12] It is common ground between the parties that reasonableness is the applicable standard of review for the Independent Chairperson’s decision. I agree (Perron v Canada (Attorney General), 2020 FC 741 (&quot;Perron&quot;) at para 45, citing Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65 (&quot;Vavilov&quot;) at para 23; see also Schmit v Canada (Attorney General), 2016 FC 1293 at paras 19-20, and the cases cited therein). Here, the author is trying to say this point is well settled. What is the standard of review for decisions of the Independent Chairperson? It is &quot;reasonableness.&quot; This was stated in Perron, which itself cited Vavilov, Canada's leading case (since 2019) on how to select the standard of review. It is important to know that Perron relied on Vavilov rather than an obsolete framework for selecting the standard of review. In your particular example, it seems that Albert E. Price, Inc. v. Metzner is or was a leading case in the 3rd Circuit on what constitues irreparable harm when seeking a preliminary injunction in copyright infringment cases (based on my very brief skim of how other judgments tend to use it). By noting that a judgment cited Metzner, this is a form of shorthand that is quite meaningful to practitioners in this area of law.
Courts look to primary authority first, and then to secondary authority if ambiguity remains. Primary Authority providing definition for the legal use of a word would be previous case opinions that give meaning to a word in a given context, how the word is actually defined in the statutes for the state, or, in the case of federal law, the federal statutes or Code of Federal Regulations. Within primary sources, you also consider whether a prior definition is binding on the court (i.e., the court has to follow it) or whether it is merely persuasive authority (that the court can choose to follow, but is not required to follow based on precedent &ndash; sometimes call Stare Decisis). Primary authority is binding on a court if the definition comes from a higher court in the direct appellate chain of the deciding court, it is persuasive otherwise. Secondary Authority is everything else. For example, Black's Law Dictionary, Whigmore on Evidence, or any other legal treatise would also be a secondary source. (All secondary authority is persuasive authority.) Courts, in absence of either, will look to how a word is commonly used in the context in which it is applied. All seek to give the proper meaning to a word or phrase in light of how it is being used.
I found a mention of this issue here, where the case Rhonda Eddy v. Ingenesis was cited. Eddy worked from home in West Virginia, but had signed her contract with a company headquartered in Texas. The link is the decision of The State of West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, which upheld the decision of the Circuit Court of Jefferson County, namely, that the Circuit Court did not have the authority to hear Eddy's petition against her employer because she was out of the Circuit Court's jurisdiction. The circuit court found that it did not have personal jurisdiction over respondent under West Virginia’s personal jurisdiction statutes, and that respondent did not have sufficient minimum contacts with West Virginia to satisfy federal due process considerations. The circuit court also found that it did not have subject matter jurisdiction over petitioner’s WPCA claim because petitioner’s employment contract contained a valid choice of law clause that mandated Texas law would govern any dispute between the parties. Emphasis mine. It all depends on stipulations made in the employment contract. This (in the United Kingdom) states 4. Place of Work Allows the employer to specify the location where the employee will work. However, it also allows for the employer to specify any other location in the future. This gives the employer much greater flexibility. That would seem to indicate that (at least in the U.K.) the place is specified in the contract.
SCOTUS blog regularly does posts on that kind of topic (see, e.g., their Stat Pack) and if you looked at their sources or the authors of those posts, you could probably easily find more. There are people who do that and make their findings publicly available, but I don't know them off hand.
David Siegel's answer correctly explains how appellate courts consider laws and arguments not addressed in the courts below. To clarify on the comparison to the Court of Cassation, though: A trial court is generally limited to considering the facts that are properly introduced by the parties, though a court may also take &quot;judicial notice&quot; of certain facts that are highly unlikely to be disputed. On review, courts of appeal are generally limited to facts supported by the evidence in the trial-court record, though they may also take judicial notice of other facts. A party is generally unable to introduce new evidence during an appeal. It is not correct that an appellate court will not review factual determinations, as those reviews probably happen in more cases than not. But -- just as with legal determinations -- those reviews can happen with varying levels of deference. For instance, if a case is tried to a jury, an appellate court will be exceedingly deferential to the jury's factual determinations, on the theory that the jury is best positioned to evaluate the evidence, gauge credibility, make reasonable inferences, etc. A judge who makes a factual determination based on in-court testimony will enjoy a similar measure of deference. But if a court makes a factual determination based only on documents submitted in support of a motion, or otherwise lacks an opportunity to evaluate a witness in person, the appellate court will be more open to different interpretations of the evidence. Legal determinations are likewise subject to varying levels of deference. At one end is the abuse-of-discretion standard. If a trial court determines that evidence is admissible or inadmissible, for instance, an appellate court will apply the abuse-of-discretion standard, which (to oversimplify) asks not whether the ruling was incorrect under the controlling law, but whether the ruling was reached without regard to the controlling law. On the other end is de novo review, in which the appellate court gives virtually no deference to the trial court and undertakes its own independent legal analysis. Perhaps even more deferential is plain-error review, which asks (to oversimplify) whether the trial court's error is so apparent that it barely needs to be debated. If the error is obvious enough (and satisfies several other criteria), the appellate court may reverse the trial court.
The meta-analysis of all the dockets you propose would be a ginormous project Even – or especially – taking citations as a Metacritic, this whole idea becomes unwieldy if you go beyond SCOTUS citing itself, for the sheer number of cases you'd have to review in creating it. Let's take as an example why it works in science: the New Journal of Physics has an impact value of 3,539 in 2020. That's 3,539 recorded citations that go to articles in the journal on average per year. Assuming that this is about a tenth of the total output of all physics journals, this puts the total number of articles published by physicists on the scale of 35,000 per year. That is a somewhat manageable number created by a tight-knit community of very interlinked people. One might call their peer review process somewhat incestuous, but it allows one to make rough estimates on the total output. On the other hand, the Justia New York State docket currently has about 350,000 cases filed. That's two orders of magnitude more than the impact factor of the New Journal of Physics for New York alone, and that only accounts for the tip of the iceberg of cases that get filed in New York, as Justia does not list all cases: it only takes federal cases. If you file in a lower court, it doesn't pop up there. It also only accounts very few cases before 2000 (in fact, the first 1999 case is on page 35,225 of 35,260). However, most cases start in the lower courts and stay in lower courts. Traffic violations rarely leave the queue upwards, and small claims court is supposed to run down cases like clockwork and never to leave the low halls. In NYC, it's supposed to start twice a day 9:30 and 18:30 and attempts to get through as many cases per judge as it can. The time frame per case (anecdotal) is about 15 minutes. Assuming only one judge holds small claims for each of the two blocks and stays on the bench for about 3.5 hours, that'd be 24 cases a day per court per day, giving us a conservative estimate of at least 6,000 cases handled in a year per court. There are 11 of these courts in New York City alone, so the city alone produces about twice the output in small claims court cases as our estimate of total physics articles published in a year. And that's only the not noteworthy (and badly documented) level of small claims. Now, back to the problem at hand: New York State has (on Justia) a docket that has, in total, an order of magnitude more cases as there are articles written in physics. That is a number that could potentially be skimmed by a supercomputer and checked for references to other cases. However, we have not just the New York State court, but we also have any other state courts. In total, there are 13 Circuits and SCOTUS to skim, though the last one has heard only 993 cases between October 2007 and October 2020, which incidentally is neglectable for the number of cases to review, even if these cases have a massively higher impact. However, our numbers rapidly rise in the sum up. Taking just the cases by the circuits from Justia (which by far isn't complete, as pointed out above): 1st Circuit, ~135000 2nd Circuit, ~440000 3rd Circuit, ~615000 4th Circuit, ~480000 5th Circuit, ~705000 6th Circuit, ~455000 7th Circuit, ~380000 8th Circuit, ~295000 9th Circuit, ~925000 10th Circuit, ~205000 11th Circuit, ~800000 DC Circuit, ~60000 Federal Circuit, ~35000 That's a total of something in the ballpark of 5,530,000 cases, just in these dockets. And that is by far not the total size of all the dockets, as those are, as mentioned above, just cases that are tried in the higher courts. So, is it possible to do such a meta analysis, looking only for... let's say SCOTUS citations? No. Even assuming that we have only 993 SCOTUS cases that are citable and we only check the cases currently on Justia, we'd still review the complete filings of over five and a half million cases for any reference to any of them! The final decisions of some cases are some 150 pages long, some docket entries contain hundreds of entries, orders and documents, some contain even complete contracts as attached documents. This makes it almost impossible to make even a rough estimate of how many files would need to be sifted to sort these 993 cases by their relevancy – and that does totally ignore landmark cases that are not SCOTUS cases such as Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956) from the District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. Yes, it was a District Court with a panel of three that found bus segregation unconstitutional (though SCOTUS affirmed the decision as Gayle v. Browder, 352 U.S. 903 (1956)). All in all, it would take Watson and a lot of time to go on this project and it might take years.
Both civil law and common law have civil codes, so that isn't the difference. It is common in civil law jurisdictions for these to be called civil codes and consolidated into the great big book of law. In common law jurisdictions, the civil code is scattered through legislation, regulation, administrative and case law and often not consolidated although, each piece of legislation typically deals with only one (or a related number) of topics. Adversarial vs Inquisitorial In a common law jurisdiction, the role of the judge/jury is to decide the dispute that the parties have brought to the court based solely on the arguments and evidence that they make. A judge who seeks their own evidence or decides the case based on a law the parties have not argued is making a mistake. The judge is free to say to the parties "But what about xyz law?" and let them make an argument about that but they would be denying the parties natural justice if they decided the case on xyz law if that law was not argued. In civil law jurisdiction, the role of the judge/jury is to find out the truth. They have inquisitorial power and decide the case based on all the evidence, the law that was argued and their own knowledge of the law. Precedence In common law jurisdictions, the cases decided by the courts are just as much the law of the land as the acts passed by parliament. When a court hands down a decision on a certain fact pattern, then all courts lower in the hierarchy must make the same decision when presented by a similar fact pattern. These are binding precedents. In addition, decisions of same level or lower courts (where not actually the ones being appealed) as well as decisions in "parallel" jurisdictions are persuasive precedents. A parallel jurisdiction is anything where the law is close enough that it makes sense to use it: Australian courts will tend to look first to other Australian states, then to England &amp; Wales, Canada, New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries then the United States of America and then to civil law jurisdictions. There is nothing nativist in this, it is just that these are the jurisdictions where the laws are "closest" to one another: partly because the courts have historically done this (which tends to lock the common law together), partly because there has been governmental will in creating harmonized laws in Australia (i.e. enacted in each state and territory but essentially the same law - often word for word) and partly because parliaments, when drafting legislation, nick ideas from other parliaments. If the Supreme Court of Western Australia has made a decision on a similar fact pattern under a similar law, a District Court judge in New South Wales had better have some damn good reasons for deciding this case differently but they wouldn't automatically be wrong if they did. However, if the precedent had been set in the Supreme Court of New South Wales than the District Court judge would be wrong to decide differently. Naturally, a lot of argument in common law courts is about why the facts of this case are sufficiently similar/distinct that the precedent should/shouldn't apply. Also, common law judgments emphasize the reasoning that led the judge from the evidence to the conclusion and include detailed analysis of the case each party presented - this is because they need to be understandable to a wide audience. Court hierarchy can be quite complex, this is the one for NSW, Australia: In a civil law jurisdiction, courts are not bound by the rules of precedence - each judgement is a first principles analysis of the facts and the law. This is not to say that civil law judges do not use other judgments in their analysis but they are not required to do so. Broadly speaking, the common law approach promotes consistency, the civil law approach promotes individualized justice.
Google Scholar is not specifically a legal research tool. The search does return many court and legal documents Which court opinions do you include? Currently, Google Scholar allows you to search and read published opinions of US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791. In addition, it includes citations for cases cited by indexed opinions or journal articles which allows you to find influential cases (usually older or international) which are not yet online or publicly available. From https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html#coverage but by reading those inclusions, you can see that it's not as complete as some of the paid commercial services available. The most important criticism of Google Scholar for legal research appears to be the lack of a way to fully Shepardize cases; see Shepard's Citations - Wikipedia Shepardizing determines if cases have been overruled (or reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases). Google Scholar will show case citations; but they are not as complete as commercial services. See https://www.google.com/search?q=google+scholar+shepardize for critical references. If you're going to argue with a lawyer, completely Shepardizing your relevant cases is rather important.