A Town/Landmark Chambers webinar on the Planning Court in practice and the future implications of the Faulks review is taking place at 5.30pm on 14 October, when I will be joined by Landmark Chambers’ John Litton QC, Tim Buley QC and Jenny Wigley, together with my Town partner Duncan Field. Free registration here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2gsWU81vT7erSoeWqqQ7MQ .
The webinar is in part a follow-on from the development of the Town/Landmark Chambers Case Explorer (a case searching and statistical analysis tool containing every judgment of the Planning Court since its creation in 2014 to June 2020, together with appellate judgments) and in part will consider the likely implications of the Faulks Review Of Administrative Law, which I covered in a 12 September 2020 blog post . The call for evidence deadline of 19 October 2020 is fast approaching.
But what I wanted to give you a taste of in this short post is how, with data scientist Joseph White of legal engineers Simmons Wavelength, we’ve begun to play around with new ways of exploring the contents of the Planning Court Case Explorer, and in particular the ways in which case law develops – the Planning Court Case Network.
The following images illustrate a visualised “citation network” of Planning Court cases. Each circle or ‘node’ represents a case, and each line or ‘edge’ between two nodes represents where one case has cited another (a line that curves clockwise from one case represents where that case has cited another, and a line that curves anti-clockwise represents where it has been cited). The more times a case has been cited, the larger the node.
The lone nodes on the perimeter represent cases that do not cite other cases and which have not been cited in subsequent cases.
Selecting an individual case node allows you to see some case topic keywords (extracted with a data science technique for language processing), a link to Bailii and all “incoming” links (later cases that cite the selected case) and “outgoing” links (earlier cases that the selected case cites itself).
In terms of the network layout, citations between cases draw them closer together, so what naturally emerges is dense groups or ‘clusters’ of cases that are closely related to each other (which is also represented to a certain extent by the colours).
The connections are fascinating. Whilst the data is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate we can see what are the most influential cases: Suffolk Coastal assumes centre stage as the most cited case in the whole network (62 citations!). Champion, has its own network of 30 citations, and Dover District Council v CPRE Kent has 22 citations.
Just pretty images or can I be the first to say… PlanLawTech?!
Simon Ricketts, 10 October 2020
Personal views, et cetera
SIMONICITY 