A study that literally affects the constitutional landscape of a nation based on coin flips - the ethics review board discussions must have been interesting.
Most (all?) of those decisions were going to come down the same way regardless; the judge (or clerk or amicus brief author or whoever) had already decided and the citations are just a way of making up a post-facto justification.
There’s even a whole “judicial philosophy” based around this method of deciding first (based on personal preference or coin tosses or bribes or whatever) and then cherry-picking citations to pretend it wasn’t really your own decision / avoid having to explain your reasoning: so-called “originalism”. And it goes back decades, long before Wikipedia.
> Most (all?) of those decisions were going to come down the same way regardless; the judge (or clerk or amicus brief author or whoever) had already decided and the citations are just a way of making up a post-facto justification.
It's true that since they find that the gain appears to be concentrated in 'positive' citations, used as justification, they probably didn't flip many decisions immediately (if any). But they also do followup linguistic analysis to show that (like the earlier studies) judges are borrowing language in describing their decisions. So you are going to have an accumulating effect here where the citations at zeroth order are used for justification, but that makes those cases better known later on, and they will be described as the article describes, and increasingly interpreted that way when read by later judges due to being precedent, and who will then copy it (that's how common law is supposed to work!). And that may well start begin flipping cases.
Finding a source that conveniently supports the judgement you wish to deliver, is not quite the same thing as being swayed by the source you come across. Both would manifest as an increase in citations, and it's hard to tell which has occurred here (perhaps a mix - but in what ratio?)
There’s even a whole “judicial philosophy” based around this method of deciding first (based on personal preference or coin tosses or bribes or whatever) and then cherry-picking citations to pretend it wasn’t really your own decision / avoid having to explain your reasoning: so-called “originalism”. And it goes back decades, long before Wikipedia.