方法对比

	法律内容分析	案例法分析
领域	田野方法	田野方法
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	1940s–1970s (applied systematically to legal texts)	Medieval English common law; academic formalisation 19th–20th century
提出者	Interdisciplinary; foundational content analysis by Harold Lasswell (1940s); applied to legal texts by empirical legal scholars from the 1970s onward	Common law tradition (England); systematised in Anglo-American jurisprudence
类型	Systematic qualitative-quantitative text analysis	Qualitative legal research method
开创性文献	Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (2nd ed.). Sage Publications. ISBN: 978-0761915454	Hutchinson, T. (2010). Researching and Writing in Law (3rd ed.). Thomson Reuters. ISBN: 9780455227689
别名	LCA, legal text analysis, jurimetric content analysis, statutory content analysis	judicial decision analysis, legal case analysis, jurisprudential analysis, case-based legal research
相关	6	6
摘要	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.	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.