Introduction

Initial project (2012-2014)

In this project, we collected data on how often and in which circumstances ten supreme courts (i.e. the highest courts in the private law and criminal law areas) cite each other. We managed to get access to the full text of almost all decisions of the supreme courts of Austria, Belgium, England and Wales, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, for the period between 2000 and 2007. In total, we considered 636,172 decisions and we found 1,430 cross-citations. In the papers deriving from this project, we use different tools to make sense of this dataset [Note: the figure on the right hand side is from Gelter & Siems SCER 2013].


New project (since 2021)

In this project, data were collected on cross-citations between the 28 highest domestic courts responsible for matters of private law in the EU, covering the period from 2000 to 2018. Analysis of this project is in progress and both the paper and the data will be published on this website in due course  [Note: the figure on the right hand side is from Siems, Law & Social Inquiry, forthcoming].