Law in Order: An Open Legal Citation Network for New Zealand

The potential of leveraging network science in the area of law has long been advocated and highlighted through case and legislation networks. Yet this particular subdomain of data management and information retrieval is still heavily underutilised in both practice and research. One of the contributing factors to this problem is the lack of openly available legal data. This paper describes the development of a legal citation network for New Zealand. In contrast to traditional case citation networks, this data repository also includes legislation and court data. Our network provides the data and references from over 300,000 decisions, 10,000 legislations and 115 courts from all levels of jurisdiction. Additionally, we present exemplifying network analysis results to reveal previously hidden information about the New Zealand legal system and to motivate future research in this domain.