The power laws of the Italian Constitutional Court, and their relevance for legal scholars

The paper examines two different sets of rulings by the Italian Constitutional Court ("ICC"), namely the in via incidentale ("IVI"), and the in via principale ("IVP"), rulings, vis-à-vis the web of scholarly opinions ("WSO"), devoted to such cases. On the one hand, the paper shows that all such networks, i.e. IVIN, IVPN, and WSO, follow power laws patterns of informational distribution. On the other hand, this stance allows us to deepen the meaning of legal relevance. In addition to the ICC decisions widely debated by scholars, we should take into account cases that are relevant in both IVIN and IVPN and still, WSO scarcely debates them. This is the class of legal cases that scholars ignore at their own risk, since the higher a case is ranked in the citation network of the court, the higher the probability that scholars will have to reflect on such case soon.