Interactive Visualization of Australian Case Law

A project has mapped all cases of the Australian High Court from 1901 to 2025, creating an interactive legal knowledge graph. Each node represents a decision of the Court, with the size reflecting the frequency of citation. The position of the nodes is determined by a vector embedding in a three-dimensional space.

Methodology

The dataset was built from the Open Australian Legal Corpus, enriched with metadata extracted via the Kanon 2 Enricher. This allowed citations to be normalized and deduplicated, creating approximately 20,000 links between judgments. Subsequently, vector embeddings were generated for each case, reduced to a 3D representation via PaCMAP. The K-means algorithm was used to infer thematic clusters, labeled via TF-IDF.

Results

The visualization reveals interesting patterns:

  • Related areas of law are located close to each other in 3D space.
  • It is possible to interactively explore specific subregions, such as constitutional cases concerning Indigenous communities.
  • The time dimension reflects legal history, with an increase in citations of domestic authorities after the Australia Acts 1986.

The code to reproduce the results is available on GitHub.