A Network Analysis of Judicial Cross-Citations in Europe

Recent years have seen a growing literature on cross-citations (i.e. citations between courts from different countries). What explains why such cross-citations occur between some courts but not others? This paper addresses this question with original data on 2,967 citations between the private-law supreme courts of the twenty-eight Member States of the European Union. These cross-citations form a valued network of twenty-eight nodes which can be analyzed with tools of network analysis. This paper uses the method of a multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure (MR-QAP) in order to address the dependency of observations in a network. The explanatory variables distinguish between variables that proxy for legal similarities between countries and other factors – and, thus, this paper contributes to the wider debate about the predominance of either legal or non-legal factors in judicial decision making. The main finding is that non-legal factors play a decisive role, notably a common native language and overlapping language skills, while legal families are not found to be a significant determinant