The German Federal Courts Dataset 195002018: From Paper Archives to Linked Open Data

Various reasons explain why Europe lags behind other jurisdictions in Empirical Legal Studies, especially regarding judicial decision-making. One of them is a scarcity of field data, even on the highest tiers of adjudication. Civil law jurisdictions differ markedly from their common law counterparts in the emphasis they place on individual judges. Hence very little empirical data is available on how courts are composed and how that composition changes over time. The present project attempts to change that by easing access to such data and thus lowering the threshold for empirical studies on the composition of the judiciary. It creates a resource for Empirical Legal Scholarship in order to start closing a research gap and to inspire more European scholars to engage with the empirical aspects of civil law adjudication. Several thousand pages of German court documentation were digitized, transcribed into machine-readable tables (ready to be imported into statistics software) and published online. To explore new avenues for sharing public domain data, they were also modeled as linked open data and imported into a prominent data repository.