Chasing the Invisible in the Grammar of Repetitions: A Network Analysis Approach to Fiscal State Aids

The significance of interpretation principles seems to be inexorably tied to the moments in time when they are recurrently referenced by scholars or judges. Moreover, these sequences of references may undergo substantial shifts in meaning or contextual usage over time. Based on this phenomenon, our work proposes a network analysis approach to identify and locate such pivotal points. Specifically, we begin by extracting and mapping citations in judicial rulings, focusing on the specific context of fiscal state aids in the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. We then demonstrate how applying network analysis to these citations can serve as a valuable tool for enriching the legal study of CJEU case-law. In detail, we focused on the network of precedents as cited by the Court to verify how the case-law develops new interpretative principles and contributes to the creation of a legal framework for European discipline of fiscal State aids. To retrieve the necessary information on precedent references within a judgment, we utilized the XML representation accessible on the EUR-Lex platform. We then employed regular expressions to parse the text and guarantee the precise and complete extraction of citations. Our research highlights how automated analysis of citation networks can offer valuable resources to supplement conventional legal methodologies.