Home / Vol.13, n°1 / La demi-vie des jugements

It is widely known, in law, that a judge uses rules established in precedents for argumentation. In fact, he relies on it and has to respect the rules that are already defined : case law materials are authoritative. He is to respect precedent law and stay on the decision (« stare decisis »).

According to this conception, the available case law collection grows through time : more and more decisions can be cited to interpret a particular point of law. But reality shows a different picture. The case law that gets cited changes. Law evolves. And the judgments that were once important are, eventually, forgotten. In the end, they are replaced by recent developpements.

In this thesis, jurimetrics is used to evaluate the rythm to which law evolves. Statistics are computed by using automated software in order to compare, from one sample to another, the rythm to which cited decisions change. Software is used to compute the age of citations in judgments and establish averages. It is thus possible to evaluate the halflife of case law judgments and, therefore, provide with an idea of the rythm to which law evolves.

[*] La présente étude reprend une mémoire de maîtrise présenté à la Faculté des études supérieures de l’Université de Montréal, en vue de l’obtention du grade de Maître en droit, option Droit des technologies de l’information. Ce mémoire a été dirigé par le professeur Daniel Poulin et soutenu en décembre 2006.

[**] Courriel : paree@lexum.umontreal.ca