方法对比

	案例法分析	法律内容分析
领域	田野方法	田野方法
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	Medieval English common law; academic formalisation 19th–20th century	1940s–1970s (applied systematically to legal texts)
提出者	Common law tradition (England); systematised in Anglo-American jurisprudence	Interdisciplinary; foundational content analysis by Harold Lasswell (1940s); applied to legal texts by empirical legal scholars from the 1970s onward
类型	Qualitative legal research method	Systematic qualitative-quantitative text analysis
开创性文献	Hutchinson, T. (2010). Researching and Writing in Law (3rd ed.). Thomson Reuters. ISBN: 9780455227689	Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (2nd ed.). Sage Publications. ISBN: 978-0761915454
别名	judicial decision analysis, legal case analysis, jurisprudential analysis, case-based legal research	LCA, legal text analysis, jurimetric content analysis, statutory content analysis
相关	6	6
摘要	Case law analysis is a systematic method for examining judicial decisions to identify binding legal rules, evolving doctrines, and interpretive trends. Rooted in the common law tradition of stare decisis, it requires the researcher to locate the ratio decidendi — the binding reasoning — of each decision, distinguish it from obiter dicta, and trace how that reasoning has been applied, distinguished, or overruled across subsequent cases. The method is fundamental to legal scholarship, litigation strategy, and law reform research.	Legal content analysis applies the systematic procedures of content analysis to legal texts — statutes, regulations, judicial opinions, treaties, and legal commentaries — in order to identify patterns, themes, and trends across a corpus of legal material. It bridges qualitative legal scholarship and quantitative social-science methods, enabling researchers to draw reproducible, evidence-based conclusions about how law is written, applied, or has changed over time.