Court Decisions: 99 % Uncharted Deep Sea?Mapping the Blind Spot of Digital Legal Studies over Half a Century (1971-2019)
Legal research increasingly turns to systematic analyses of large amounts of legal text. Current research programs such as Big Data Legal Scholarship, Evidence-Based Jurisprudence, Law & Corpus Linguistics, Computer-Assisted Legal Linguistics, and Law as Data all rely (one way or another) on digitizing or collecting, collectively analysing and quantifying features of text corpora from various genres. First and foremost among these genres are court decisions, due to both their normative force (either stare decisis, or de facto) and their easy and legally unconstrained useability: Court decisions are in the public domain pretty much everywhere (in Germany, Sec. 5 of the Copyright Act...
