Citation networks in administrative law books from the civil law world (nineteenth century)

This paper analyses citations of doctrine in handbooks of administrative law published in the nineteenth century in the Civil Law World – that is, Europe and Latin America. I scanned through 81 books, finding c 25,000 citations to c 5000 different texts. I built a graph with all citations to find relations of proximity and distance between different books and national groups of books. I found that French lawyers were the most cited, but they lost ground in the late nineteenth century. ‘Germans’ and, to a less extent, ‘Italians’ gained ground. Germans and Austrians constituted a mostly separated citation circuit. Spanish and Hispano Americans tended to cite Spanish and French authors but were less integrated. Italians mixed a large number of Italian references with French ones. Brazilians and Portuguese heavily cited the French. Latin Americans did not constitute a unified group. Mediterranean countries shared more characteristics and references with Latin Americans than with Germans and the Dutch. These findings challenge essentialist ideas of ‘continental law’ and ‘Latin America’.