From Dogma to Data: Exploring How Case Law Evolves

The project is led by Professor Henrik Palmer and is funded by the Free Research Council. The project began December 1st 2014 and will run to November 20th 2017. The project investigates how case law evolves, in a new empirical way. Hopefully, this will provide a better understanding of how the courts work. When describing the current legal position of a certain area, it is common to use case law to show which laws apply to this area in particular.

However, a complete analysis of the rulings from the courts are rarely or never available. This is in part, due to the massive amount of case law. It is simply impossible for one person to read, analyze and systematize all the rulings. The consequence of this is that the descriptions of legal positions often are based on subjective choices in terms of what case law is included and what is left out. However, by starting with the newest developments in automated processing of textual contents, together with network analysis of legal texts, it has become possible to systematically analyze all rulings given by a specific court.

In doing so, it is now possible to get a completely new empirical view of what types of cases a court decides, what is decisive in the cases and how the case law has evolved over time. Based on a case study of three selected international courts, the project will create a database, which will be the base for communicating far more extensive knowledge on the way the courts work, than we are used to. This creates opportunities for lawyers, as well as ordinary citizens, who will now be able to gather information on the courts case law much faster, than they could before.

This will strengthen the rule of law in society, as well as contribute to better legal research and legal education. If you wish to know more please contact: Henrik.palmer.olsen@jur.ku.dk

People involved

Henrik Palmer Olsen

Professor, Associate Dean for Research. University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Law.

http://jura.ku.dk/english/centres_service_units/deans_office/staff/?pure=en/persons/125061

Can quantitative methods complement doctrinal legal studies? Using citation network and corpus linguistic analysis to understand international courts. / Olsen, Henrik Palmer; Sadl, Urska. In: Leiden Journal of International Law, 2017.

Finding Hidden Patterns in ECtHR’s Case Law: On How Citation Network Analysis Can Improve Our Knowledge of ECtHR’s Article 14 Practice. / Olsen, Henrik Palmer; Küçüksu, Aysel. In: International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2017.

Identification of Case Content with Quantitative Network Analysis: An Example from the ECtHR. / Christensen, Martin Lolle; Olsen, Henrik Palmer; Tarissan, Fabian. Legal Knowledge and Information Systems. ed. / Floris Bex; Serena Villata. Amsterdam : IOS Press, 2016. p. 53-62.

Netværksanalyse som bidrag til juridisk (forsknings)metode. / Olsen, Henrik Palmer; Christensen, Martin. In: Juristen, No. 3, 2016, p. 110-123.

Counting on International Courts, with Urska Sadl (iCourts Working Paper 8/2014)

Urška Šadl

Professor, European University Institute and Global Research Fellow University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Law.

http://www.eui.eu/DepartmentsAndCentres/Law/People/Professors/%C5%A0adl.aspx

Can quantitative methods complement doctrinal legal studies? Using citation network and corpus linguistic analysis to understand international courts. / Olsen, Henrik Palmer; Sadl, Urska. In: Leiden Journal of International Law, 2017.

Selecting the Cases that Defined Europe: Complementary Metrics for Network Analysis (forthcoming in the proceedings of The 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), San Francisco, 2016, with Fabien Tarissan and Yannis Panagis)

Counting on International Courts, with Henrik Palmer Olsen (iCourts Working Paper 8/2014)

Anders Søgaard

Professor, University of Copenhagen, Department of Computer Science

http://diku.dk/english/staff/?pure=en/persons/221553

Fabien Tarissan

Chargé de recherché, CNRS, Paris

http://www.isp.cnrs.fr/?TARISSAN-Fabien

https://www-complexnetworks.lip6.fr/~tarissan/

Identification of Case Content with Quantitative Network Analysis : An Example from the ECtHR. / Christensen, Martin Lolle; Olsen, Henrik Palmer; Tarissan, Fabian. Legal Knowledge and Information Systems. ed. / Floris Bex; Serena Villata. Amsterdam : IOS Press, 2016. p. 53-62.

Selecting the Cases that Defined Europe: Complementary Metrics for Network Analysis (forthcoming in the proceedings of The 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), San Francisco, 2016, with Urska Sadl and Yannis Panagis)

Analysing the first case of the International Criminal Court from a network-science perspective. Fabien Tarissan, Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach. In journal of Complex Networks, 4(4):616—634, Oxford University Press, 2016.

Temporal proterties of legal decision networks: a case study from the International Criminal Court. Fabian Tarissan, Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach. In 28^th International Conference on legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX’15), Braga, Portugal, 2015.

The network of the International Criminal Court decisions as a complex system. [Best paper award] Fabian Tarissan, Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach. In ISCS 2013: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems, Emergence, Complexity and Computation, 8:255-264, Springer, 2013.

Sune Lehman

Associate professor, Technical University of Denmark

http://www.dtu.dk/english/service/phonebook/person?id=25317&tab=1

Amalie Frese

Videnskabelig assistent, KU-JUR

http://jura.ku.dk/english/staff/research/?pure=en%2Fpersons%2Famalie-frese(4e557e85-cee1-427a-b153-349a22046ef0).html

Natalie Schluter

Assistant professor, IT University of Copenhagen

www.itu.dk/~nael

Martin Christensen

PhD student, European University Institute.

Netværksanalyse som bidrag til juridisk (forsknings)metode. / Olsen, Henrik Palmer; Christensen, Martin. In: Juristen, No. 3, 2016, p. 110-123.

Identification of Case Content with Quantitative Network Analysis: An Example from the ECtHR. / Christensen, Martin Lolle; Olsen, Henrik Palmer; Tarissan, Fabian. Legal Knowledge and Information Systems. ed. / Floris Bex; Serena Villata. Amsterdam : IOS Press, 2016. p. 53-62.

On Top of Topics: Leveraging Topic Modeling to Study the Dynamic Case-Law of International Courts. / Panagis, Yannis; Christensen, Martin Lolle; and Šadl, Urška, in F. Bex and S. Villata (Eds.), Legal Knowledge and Information Systems – JURIX 2016: The Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference, IOS Press, Nice, 2016, pp. 161-166. (Peer reviewed – Conference Paper) – doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-726-9-161 – http://ebooks.iospress.nl/volumearticle/45751

Yannis Panagis

Data Specialist, University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Law

http://jura.ku.dk/english/staff/research/?id=455258&vis=medarbejder

Selecting the Cases that Defined Europe: Complementary Metrics for Network Analysis (forthcoming in the proceedings of The 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), San Francisco, 2016, with Fabien Tarissan and Urska Sadl)

The Force of EU Case Law: An Empirical Study of Precedential Constraint (JURIX proceedings, The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems, 2015, with Urska Sadl)

What is a Leading Case in European Union Law: An Empirical Analysis ((2015) 40 European Law Review 15, with Urska Sadl)

Panagis, Yannis, and Evangelos Sakkopoulos. “Scaling Out to Become Doctrinal.” In International Workshop of Algorithmic Aspects of Cloud Computing, pp. 157-168. Springer, 2016.