Legal culture and local context: some empirical evidence

The Italian Criminal Cassazione Court (hereafter Superior Court) issues almost 48,000 judgments each year. This huge number of orders allows a strong discretion by the lower courts of first instance and appellate courts in the selection of these type of adjudications considered useful for justifying their decisions. This paper attempts an empirical description of the modalities in which the lower courts overcome the problems related to the overproduction of case law, which is tied to a more limited “local justice” that has passed the Supreme Court’s scrutiny. We analysed the content of 728 criminal sentences issued by lowercourts in the four Sicilian Districts of the Court of Appeal. The analysis concerned the quotations of judgments by the Supreme Court into their texts. Once identified, the Superior Court orders: were extracted from the database of the same Superior Court; used to determine which lower court issued their own judgments quoting those orders as a corroboration of legitimacy; comparing the judgment on the merits of the population examined components. An algorithm we created, takes computer-stored plaintext representations of court sentences as input and automatically extracts all legal quotations from a corpus of sentences. This makes it possible analysing the aggregate citation patterns of particular districts and make a comparative study between them. We have observed that the different legal districts were characterised by a difference in quotation patterns. This difference consists in citing Superior Court orders with different origins. Because of the different degrees of correspondence between the compared judgments we classified as a close correspondence when they were rooted in the same District Court of Appeal; as a strong correspondence when they referred to contiguous districts; as a weak correspondence if they arose to one of the four Sicilian districts; as a lack of correspondence if they were issued out of the four districts.