Citations of previous decisions and the quality of judicial reasoning

Abstract

Inserting citations to authorities into a text, in order to increase the persuasive power of it, and prove the competence of the author, has a long tradition in science and in law. The question is whether this also applies to judicial decisions. This question is especially interesting in a continental legal culture, where following previous cases is not obligatory, there is no stare decisis, and therefore, inserting a reference to a previous case may have a different function. In 2012 we performed a computer-based citation analysis of the court decisions published under FOI act on the official website of the National Office for the Judiciary (Orszagos Birosagi Hivatal). The article contains four sections. The first and the second sections are dealing with citations within judicial decisions in general, and their significance in different legal cultures. The third section is about the quantitative, while the fourth is about the qualitative part of the research, and tackle the issue whether citations increa...