Describing the Development of Case Law

This paper considers dynamic aspects of the development of case law. The underlying approach is to see law as a "moving classification system" based on Levi's notion of a three stage life cycle for case law. Our aim is to provide foundations for computational support for consideration of these dynamic aspects. We first use a fictional example to show how our approach works, and then illustrate the approach by applying it to sequences of real cases: Levi's cases starting from Dixon v Bell, and cases concerning the automobile exception to the US 4th Amendment, focusing on those involving luggage.