The courts have held that instructions – instructions given by the judge to the jury regarding the law applicable to the case – are the «law of the case» if the respondent, the plaintiff, accepted the directions as correct at the time they were issued. Recently, there has been more interest in case law citation studies, where there appear to be two main directions: the application of network analysis to citations (Zhang and Koppaka 2007; Leicht et al., 2007; Winkels et al., 2011; Lupu and Voeten, 2012; van Opijnen 2012; Neale, 2013) and classification systems that estimate the «treatment status» of the cited case (Jackson et al., 2003; Galgani et al., 2015). [71] Parliament is often well placed to address the issue of potential competition rights. Unlike policymakers, legislators have the ability to proactively address conflicts before they arise by formulating legal language that can prevent conflicts in the first place. However, one author notes: «The choice of the legislature as the preferred forum for dealing with human rights disputes may limit, but not exclude, the scope of the problem for the courts. There will always be cases where Parliament does not foresee the negative effects that a provision intended to protect one right to another right may have»: see Eva Brems, «Conflicting Human Rights: An Exploration in the Context of the Right to a Fair Trial in the European Convention for the Defence of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Human Rights Quarterly 27 (2005) 294, p. 305. In Grabmair et al. (2015), the main objective is to evaluate documents for information retrieval using the Lucene engine. As part of their work, they have created a gold standard in which statements are commented on as legal principles or evidence as well as commentaries on aspects of the substantive structure; These phrases receive preferential treatment when assessing the suitability of a document for a search query.

Some successes are reported in the automatic annotation of declarations with a mixture of N-gram characteristics and entity types identified by manually coded UIMA rules. Subsequent work by Bansal et al. (2016) provides additional characteristics and reports some improvement in performance, particularly in ranking. The work is done on a set of domain-specific cases (US Special Masters Vaccine Injury Decisions), which should not be generalized; Our work is neutral of the field. The results published in Grabmair et al. (2015) (N-gram and entity types) are not as clearly annotated as in our approach. Our approach does not take into account the ranking or high-ranking characteristics of decisions, but the linking of specific statements of legal principles and evidence to citations in decisions; Our results are promising. A legal principle is defined as any statement used with facts to reach a conclusion. Linguistically, a legal principle may be indicated, for example by deontic modality, for example the expressions of must for obligation, must not for prohibition or may for permission, which represent necessity and possibility as opposed to epistemic modalities.

For example, before describing our approach to citation analysis, some key concepts of legal theory need to be described, as this work focuses on computer analysis of legal language rather than legal theory. In particular, cases are supposed to contain ratio decidendi, which can be translated as a ground for decision, an important reasoning that blends into the argumentative structure of future decisions. In legal theory, different approaches to the definition of ratio decidendi can be identified. As defined by Raz (2002): «ratio decidendi can be identified as the legal statements that are based on the established facts and on which the decision is based». Greenawalt (2013) provides several explanations of what constitutes the binding part of a decision: The law of the case expresses the rule that the final judgment of the highest court is the final determination of the rights of the parties. However, the doctrine of «case law» is only a political doctrine and is not taken into consideration when compelling circumstances require a redefinition of the legal question decided in the previous appeal.