Authority Scoring

Assigns a base score derived from the vertical position of the issuing court within the jurisdictional hierarchy. U.S. Supreme Court decisions receive the maximum weight, while trial court rulings receive the minimum.

• Binding Authority: A decision from a higher court in the same appellate path is weighted as mandatory.
• Persuasive Authority: Decisions from coordinate or lower courts, or from other jurisdictions, receive a reduced multiplier.
• Taxonomy Alignment: Requires a precise mapping of court nodes to a structured jurisdictional ontology.

Applies a time-based coefficient to reduce the score of older authorities, reflecting the legal principle that recent decisions are often more relevant. The decay rate is not linear; it varies by practice area.

• Constitutional Law: Very slow decay; centuries-old cases retain high weight.
• Digital Privacy Law: Extremely rapid decay; cases older than five years may be nearly obsolete.
• Algorithmic Implementation: Often modeled using an exponential decay function where the half-life is tuned per legal domain.

Classifies the nature of the citing relationship to adjust the authority score. A citation is not binary; its qualitative impact varies significantly.

• Positive Treatment: 'Followed' or 'Applied' increases the cited authority's score.
• Negative Treatment: 'Overruled', 'Abrogated', or 'Questioned' triggers a severe score penalty.
• Neutral Treatment: 'Cited' or 'Explained' results in a minor, neutral adjustment.
• Star Pagination: Pinpoint citations to specific pages indicate a deeper engagement and receive a higher weight than a general 'see also' reference.

Leverages graph theory to measure the structural importance of a case within the larger citation graph. This moves beyond simple citation counts to identify truly seminal authorities.

• In-Degree Centrality: The raw count of subsequent cases citing the authority. High volume suggests influence.
• PageRank Variants: An iterative algorithm that assigns higher scores to cases cited by other highly-cited cases, preventing manipulation by mass citation.
• Betweenness Centrality: Identifies 'bridge' cases that connect otherwise disparate clusters of legal doctrine, marking them as uniquely influential.

A binary override mechanism that can instantly nullify an authority score regardless of other metrics. This is the primary hallucination guardrail for citational integrity.

• Red Flag: A case that has been explicitly overruled or a statute that has been superseded is flagged as bad law.
• Yellow Flag: A case that has been criticized or limited receives a warning, reducing its score but not nullifying it entirely.
• Direct vs. Implied Overruling: The system must distinguish between a formal, direct overruling and an implied inconsistency identified by a later court.

Modulates the final score based on the geographic and sovereign context of the legal question. A case from the correct jurisdiction is weighted exponentially higher.

• Binding Authority Check: If the cited case is from the highest court of the relevant state on a matter of state law, it receives a maximum jurisdictional multiplier.
• Federal vs. State: A federal court's interpretation of state law is treated as persuasive, not binding, and its score is adjusted downward.
• Cross-Jurisdictional Harmonization: In multi-district litigation, the system must dynamically re-weight authorities based on the specific forum's choice-of-law rules.