{"id":113,"date":"2014-11-20T21:25:07","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T21:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/?p=113"},"modified":"2022-06-11T20:15:16","modified_gmt":"2022-06-11T20:15:16","slug":"confrontation-network-post-crawford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/2014\/11\/20\/confrontation-network-post-crawford\/","title":{"rendered":"Confrontation Network Post-Crawford"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court revolutionized Confrontation Clause jurisprudence in Crawford v. Washington<\/em>. To celebrate Crawford<\/em>‘s 10-year birthday, the Michigan Law Review<\/a> has just published an online retrospective<\/a> featuring fantastic\u00a0debate and analysis\u00a0about\u00a0the doctrine’s path\u00a0over the past decade. \u00a0As I read the essays, I realized that mapping\u00a0post-Crawford<\/em> jurisprudence could be both helpful to 6th Amendment studies and revealing about the challenges of visualizing Supreme Court citation networks. Over the next few posts then, I will explore these challenges by constructing Confrontation Clause maps.<\/p>\n

One great advantage offered by a post-Crawford<\/em> case study is that it theoretically implicates a small closed universe of cases. After all, Crawford<\/em> is only 10 years old. My first goal was to see if I could automatically “capture” all the important cases in this doctrine using the Mapper’s citation-network algorithm. As explained in this video<\/a>, this algorithm creates networks by looking for n<\/em>-degrees of connection between any two user-specified cases.<\/p>\n

To generate the network, I simply needed two\u00a0cases\u00a0that defined the earliest and latest rulings in the doctrine. Crawford<\/em>\u00a0itself is the obviously starting point. For the endpoint, I chose the Court’s latest prominent pronouncement, 2012’s Williams v. Illinois. <\/em>Now\u00a0to keep things simple, I asked the algorithm to only look for 2-degree connections. Thus, it generated a network of cases that (a) were cited by Williams<\/em>; and (b) themselves cited to\u00a0Crawford<\/em>. Here’s the result (you can click on the image to see a full-sized version of the map complete with links to the underlying opinions):<\/p>\n

\"06_Williams_Crawford_2degree_raw\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although I am no 6th Amendment expert, I could immediately tell that this map was incomplete. Where were Bullcoming v. New Mexico<\/em> and Michigan v. Bryant<\/em>? I recalled that Williams<\/em> had discussed (cited) both of those two important 2011 cases, yet they did not show up. The issue here turns out to be a technical problem related to the\u00a0Court’s practice when invoking to recent decisions\u00a0that don’t yet have proper reporter cites. In Williams<\/em>, for example, cites to Bullcoming<\/em> look\u00a0like this “564 U. S. ___”. This practice turns out to be a real pain for the computer bots that parse opinions. <\/span><\/p>\n

Now I have alerted the gurus\u00a0over at the <\/span>Free Law Project<\/a> (which generously provides the Courtlistener database and API<\/a> for all the world, including our Project, to use) about the issue<\/a> and they’ll deal with it when time permits. In the meantime, I simply added Bullcoming<\/em> and Bryant<\/em>\u00a0into the network by hand. Here is what the “fixed” 2-degree network looks like:<\/p>\n

\"07_Williams_Crawford_2degree_complete\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This looked a lot better to me, but I wanted to check it against\u00a0expert opinion. So I turned to Prof. George Fisher<\/a>‘s article in the Michigan Law retrospective mentioned above. In it, Prof. Fisher suggests that there have been “eight major rulings” in the\u00a0Crawford<\/em>\u00a0line since 2004. These are: (1) Hammon v. Indiana<\/em> (2006); (2) Davis v. Washington<\/em> (2006); (3) Wharton v. Bockting<\/em> (2007); (4) Giles v. California<\/em> (2008); (5) Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts<\/em> (2009); (6) Michigan v. Bryant<\/em> (2001); (7) Bullcoming v. New Mexico<\/em> (2011); and (8) Williams v. Illinois<\/em> (2011).<\/p>\n

So how did the algorithm do? Not bad. Looking only at the 2-degree connections between Williams<\/em> and Crawford<\/em>, the network contains all but one of the rulings Prof. Fisher identifies. The only case that is really missing is Wharton<\/em>. (Although Hammon<\/em> does not appear on the map, it was decided with\u00a0Davis<\/em> in 2006 and published in the same opinion). The only case pulled via the 2-degree method in that Prof. Fisher did not include on his list is Edwards<\/em>. Although slightly underinclusive and overinclusive, the citation-network approach provided a great first cut at identifying the key cases in the Crawford<\/em>–Williams<\/em> line.<\/p>\n

In the next post, we’ll look beyond the first cut and consider the problem of under- and over-inclusiveness in more detail. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court revolutionized Confrontation Clause jurisprudence in Crawford v. Washington. To celebrate Crawford‘s 10-year birthday, the Michigan Law Review has just published an online retrospective featuring fantastic\u00a0debate and analysis\u00a0about\u00a0the doctrine’s path\u00a0over the past decade. \u00a0As I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":400,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/400"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":883,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}