Sleeping Beauties in Case Law

A challenge in computational legal research is the quantitative assessment of "relevance" in a network of court decisions. The term "sleeping beauty" (SB) was coined to denote an article that received almost no attention immediately after publication, but suddenly received multiple citations many years later. These publications can be identified by calculating their Beauty coefficient (B-coefficient). In this contribution, we apply approaches used for identifying SBs to decisions arising from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). We compared B-coefficients of CJEU cases with their centrality scores from classical algorithms from network analysis, finding that these measures tend to correlate. We discuss the implications of this that are interesting for legal scholars, acknowledging that future work is required to calibrate the scale of the time variable in the B-coefficient formula for finer-grained application to case law. Our study's setup provides a foundation for new case law analytics methodologies that extends the power of traditional network analysis techniques for answering questions about the behavior of European courts.