Policy memo “Same Point of Law”: Citations of (Precedent) Cases in Commercial Courts" (D.Saveliev)

We present a policy memo “Same Point of Law”: Citations of [Precedent] Cases in Commercial Courts". We examined 6.9 million texts of rulings of state commercial (“arbitrazh”) courts to identify references to judicial law-making: legal positions set forth by courts in similar cases. Some findings from this study:

• there is a notable number of decisions in which such references are used, there are cases that are cited thousands of times. We call such cases the “precedent cases”.
• there exist court decisions that refer to a large number of decisions in other cases in support of the stated legal position.

We also present the Precedent Atlas — an interactive map of cases, available at http://precedent.enforce.spb.ru. Read the full text (in Russian): full text.