Studies employing network analysis to reveal hidden mechanisms in judicial decision making, both in common law as well as civil law countries often use rather vague concepts of ‘importance’ of judicial decisions, concepts that are not always thoroughly explained, tend towards certain relativity and are used together with other similar words [(legal) relevance, (legal) significance…], with or without attempting explanation of these concepts, or relying purely on operationalization. This paper argues that in the context of legal systems that do not recognize a doctrine of precedent this approach is either oversimplified, or even erroneous. It further shows that ‘importance’ of past case-law is essentially a matter of the judge’s choice. Approaching this concept in this manner allows me to show that this choice is explainable within the theoretical framework provided by theories of relevance. This paper focuses on two major approaches to relevance: linguistic pragmatism and information retrieval, and shows that the concept of optimal relevance, as understood by theories of relevance, may serve well as an underlying explanatory framework for answering the question of why judges tend to argue by referring to past case-law even in those legal systems that do not recognize a doctrine of binding precedent.

中文翻译：

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司法裁决作为相关程度的重要性

在普通法和大陆法国家中，利用网络分析揭示司法决策中隐藏机制的研究，经常使用相当模糊的司法判决“重要性”概念，这些概念并非总是得到详尽的解释，倾向于一定的相对性，而且与其他类似词语[[法律上的相关性，（法律上的）意义...]]结合使用，无论是否尝试对这些概念进行解释，或者完全依赖于可操作性。本文认为，在不承认先例学说的法律制度的背景下，这种方法要么过于简单化，要么甚至是错误的。它进一步表明，过去判例法的“重要性”本质上是法官的选择。以这种方式处理这个概念使我能够证明，这种选择在相关理论提供的理论框架内是可以解释的。本文着眼于两种主要的相关方法：语言实用主义和信息检索，并表明，相关性理论所理解的最佳相关性概念可以作为回答法官为何倾向于争论的基础解释框架。即使在那些不承认具有约束力的先例学说的法律体系中，也可以通过参考过去的判例法来解决。