Info

Overview Link to heading

Following the release of citation networks for the German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) and the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) I’ve now completed and published the citation network for the German Federal Court of Finance!

The German Federal Court of Finance Corpus (CE-BFH) now includes a specialized variant containing all citations to its own decisions as structured graph data, extracted from the text of those decisions. The variant is still in a beta testing phase.

The scope of the citation network in Version 2025-01-14 is:

  • ca. 180.000 individual citations
  • ca. 143.000 edges (citation connections weighted by number of individual citations)
  • ca. 40.000 nodes (Aktenzeichen and BFHE)

The following types of citations are included:

  • Citations from Aktenzeichen to Aktenzeichen
  • Citations from Aktenzeichen to BFHE
Note
“Aktenzeichen” are German docket numbers. “BFHE” are citations to the official collection of decisions.

Aktenzeichen (docket number) citations are less accurate than decision citations (which require a date in addition to the Aktenzeichen for unique identification). That being said, 98,73 % of all Aktenzeichen in the CE-BFH dataset are unique (independent of date), so the Aktenzeichen is a reasonable approximation. I intend to add decision-level citation support in the future.

Warning
Citing decisions can only be those where the full-text is available. This means decisions dated 2010 or later. Cited decisions can be from any year.

Basic Network Statistics Link to heading

Number of Nodes Number of Edges Strength (Out) Mean In-Degree Max In-Degree Min In-Degree
39,875.00 143,281.00 178,806.00 3.54 120.00 0.00

Network Diagram for the First, Second and Third Senates Link to heading

These diagram visualize the citation network extracted from the decisions of the First, Second and Third Senate. They represent only a subset of the data. The complete network is probably too large to be visualized in any single diagram.

The visualization algorithm is Sugiyama.

The small white dots are individual docket numbers or BFHE decisions, the connecting lines are citations (any number). Multiple citations between the same nodes are not shown in the diagram, but the weights are available in the network data.

The network is hierarchical, because newer decisions can only cite older decisions, not the other way around. The diagram is read from top to bottom.

Because of the strong connections between certain decision clusters one might call them “lines of jurisprudence”, but the research on this subject is still in its infancy. The shape may simply be an artifact of the force-directed layout.

Info
High-resolution versions of the diagrams can be downloaded here..

Citation Network of the First Senate Link to heading

Citation Network of the Second Senate Link to heading

Citation Network of the Third Senate Link to heading

Technical Note Link to heading

Note
The source code for the dataset and all analysis and quality control results are available open access.

Further Reading Link to heading

Interested in citation data for other German federal courts? I’ve released citation networks created with similar methods for the following courts:

Also, make sure to check out the work of Professor Dr. Dr. Corinna Coupette. She’s done some of the best work on German legal citation networks I’ve seen so far.