15,234 cases cite it. Is it still good law?

transcript

15,234 cases cite Brown versus Board of Education. A lawyer needs one answer from all of them. Is it still good law?

In the lesson's example, 12,000 citing cases followed it. Positive. 2,500 distinguished it. Neutral. 734 merely mention it. And overruled? Zero. That's the number a lawyer cares about most.

But here's the catch. Citations form a graph. A search engine stores documents. The trick: every citation becomes a document of its own.

Each edge holds the citing case and the cited case. Plus the treatment, a snippet and a date. Who cites Brown? A term query on the cited ID, sorted by date. Thousands of results, fast. Still good law? An aggregation on treatment. Any overruled edge, and you know which case did it.

Where does a treatment come from? The extractor reads 100 characters either side of each citation. Overruled, or abrogated, nearby? It's marked overruled. Distinguished, or unlike? Distinguished. Followed, accord, affirmed? Followed. Anything else is just a mention.

Who cites this case is one term query. Good law is one aggregation. A generic search box couldn't do this. Model the question, not just the text.

Full breakdown in the lecture.