David Wicker
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Pages, systems, publications, and public work.

23 results

Pages

Research & publications

Projects

Fieldwork & access

Elsewhere

Legal data systems for reproducible research.

David builds extraction, normalization, search, access, and analysis infrastructure for European case-law research.

What the research depends on.

Computational legal studies depend on data provenance, accessible tools, and methodological traceability. Current work focuses on European case law, semantic retrieval, citation graph analysis, and the system boundaries that make large legal corpora reliable enough to study.

View the institutional profile

Research systems and methods.

  1. 01Case Law Explorer platformA modular legal-research platform that joins court-data search, shared identity, scoped access, rate limits, APIs, and reproducible deployment.2025–present
    Active
  2. 02Why some judgments matter more than othersA reproducible comparison of centrality methods for citation networks in European human-rights case law.2026
    Accepted · ICAIL 2026

One network, three rankings.

This 14-case excerpt comes from the unbalanced ECtHR network used in the ICAIL analysis. Change the method: the 33 recorded citations stay fixed while the meaning of “central” changes.

Full network
27,801 cases
Directed citations
232,002
Visible excerpt
14 cases · 33 edges
Source revision
13b36027

Choose a ranking rule.

Counts incoming citations as a share of the network. This is the deterministic rule used to select the six precedent anchors.

Swipe sideways to inspect the full network. Focus a judgment for its citation neighborhood.

Interactive fourteen-case ECtHR citation topologyEight later judgments are connected by 33 directed citation edges to six high in-degree precedent judgments. Focus a judgment to isolate its recorded neighborhood. A complete text table follows the figure.CITING DECISIONSlater judgments · outgoing referencesPRECEDENT ANCHORSsix highest distinct-application in-degreesedge direction: citing judgment → referenced judgmentC1#14VLAD AND OTHERS v. ROMANIA2013 · 0.000% in-degreeC2#07KAFKARIS v. CYPRUS2008 · 0.500% in-degreeC3#08NECHAY v. UKRAINE2021 · 0.371% in-degreeC4#09YEVGENIY ALEKSEYENKO v. RUSSIA2011 · 0.223% in-degreeC5#12LISOVSKIJ v. LITHUANIA2017 · 0.043% in-degreeC6#13NAZAROV v. RUSSIA2009 · 0.040% in-degreeC7#10ISTVAN AND ISTVANOVA v. SLOVA…2012 · 0.076% in-degreeC8#11GORBATENKO v. UKRAINE2013 · 0.058% in-degreeP1#01FRYDLENDER v. FRANCE2000 · 10.59% in-degreeP2#02KUDLA v. POLAND2000 · 9.41% in-degreeP3#03LABITA v. ITALY2000 · 5.00% in-degreeP4#04IATRIDIS v. GREECE1999 · 3.98% in-degreeP5#05SELMOUNI v. FRANCE1999 · 3.77% in-degreeP6#06PÉLISSIER AND SASSI v. FRA…1999 · 3.62% in-degree
The excerpt is regenerated from merged-article-edges/full-unbalanced and results/fixed-merged-subarticles-edges/master_centralities.csv at commit 13b36027. The selection is deterministic; method switching never alters the underlying edges.
Inspect all 14 judgments and source values
NodeJudgmentApplicationYearExcerpt linksIn-degreeDegreePageRank
C1VLAD AND OTHERS v. ROMANIA40756/06;41508/07;50806/07201350.000%0.129%5.05e-6
C2KAFKARIS v. CYPRUS21906/04200840.500%0.601%1.14e-4
C3NECHAY v. UKRAINE15360/10202140.371%0.428%9.07e-5
C4YEVGENIY ALEKSEYENKO v. RUSSIA41833/04201140.223%0.403%4.51e-5
C5LISOVSKIJ v. LITHUANIA36249/14201740.043%0.266%8.45e-6
C6NAZAROV v. RUSSIA13591/05200940.040%0.173%8.88e-6
C7ISTVAN AND ISTVANOVA v. SLOVAKIA30189/07201240.076%0.147%2.35e-5
C8GORBATENKO v. UKRAINE25209/06201340.058%0.126%1.15e-5
P1FRYDLENDER v. FRANCE30979/962000410.59%10.60%6.85e-3
P2KUDLA v. POLAND30210/96200089.41%9.48%5.08e-3
P3LABITA v. ITALY26772/95200065.00%5.02%3.29e-3
P4IATRIDIS v. GREECE31107/96199943.98%3.98%7.72e-2
P5SELMOUNI v. FRANCE25803/94199973.77%3.77%4.20e-3
P6PÉLISSIER AND SASSI v. FRANCE25444/94199943.62%3.62%3.28e-3

Case Law Explorer architecture.

The maintained system separates ingestion, the unified legal-data schema, API contracts, optional policy enforcement, the research interface, and operations.

  1. 01

    Sources

    Rechtspraak, HUDOC, and CELLAR enter through corpus-specific extractors.

  2. 02

    ETL

    Airflow resolves ECLIs and retains provenance; the migrator applies checksummed schema changes.

  3. 03

    Data plane

    cle_v2 joins common cases to corpus records, text, and citation edges.

  4. 04

    API

    Fifteen bounded routes cover search, text, expansion, links, and graph methods.

  5. 05

    Policy

    Optional identity and /v1/check keep caller, scope, cost, and quota separate.

  6. 06

    Interface

    SvelteKit proxies API calls server-side and fetches full text only on demand.

  7. 07

    Operations

    Coolify composes migration, API, UI, backups, SQL maintenance, and ETL.

Methods and infrastructure.

  • Data

    SPARQL extraction, normalized legal schemas, provenance, Postgres, columnar research exports, and graph-ready projections.

  • Systems

    Service boundaries, Docker, Keycloak, scoped authorization, cross-framework packages, rate enforcement, and server operations.

  • Research

    Citation networks, centrality comparison, reproducibility packages, traceability documents, and method-aware visual explanation.

  • Retrieval

    Semantic search and retrieval-augmented systems for large legal corpora, with explicit attention to reliability and evidence.