Context

Scholars from law, computer science and political science are increasingly using novel computational analyses such as natural language processing, machine learning and network analysis to investigate the case law of national and international apex courts. This workshop aims to take stock of these efforts, present new research and identify common best practices.

Issues

The computational analysis of apex courts faces a host of challenges. Data is often not readily available making it necessary to create new corpora from scratch. Even where data exists, it typically requires significant efforts to pre-process documents or to extract relevant information such as meta-data on decisions or citations between decisions. When these hurdles are overcome, a host of new questions arise to match the right method with the right legal or empirical research question. What language model to choose? What network metric to select? How to ensure that small changes in approach do not lead to large changes in results? Once the analysis is done and the findings are written up, the head scratching continues. What outlets accept papers that transcend disciplinary boundaries? How can the data and methods be made available to others? In a young field such as the empirical analysis of (apex) courts using computational tools, research conventions and best practices are still emerging.

Workshop

This workshop held in conjunction with the 19th ICAIL seeks to get scholars who work on these issues together to (1) present their ongoing research on the computational analysis of apex courts and to (2) collect best practices and lessons learned. Remote participation is possible, but we encourage participation in-person.        

Organizer:

Wolfgang Alschner, University of Ottawa, Canada (wolfgang.alschner@uottawa.ca)

Workshop Schedule (tentative)

9:00-10:30 Network Analysis and Apex Courts

• Gijs van Dijck, Benjamin Rodrigues de Miranda and Chloé Crombach, Centrality Scores and Precedent Value in Legal Network Analysis

• Anmol Goel, Vanshpreet Singh Kohli, Shreyansh Agarwal, Saptarshi Ghosh, Charu Sharma and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, The Curious Case of Delayed Recognition in the Indian Supreme Court

• Isabelle St.-Hilaire and Wolfgang Alschner, Using Network Citation Analysis to Reveal Precedential Archetypes at the Supreme Court of Canada

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-11:45 Natural Language Processing of Apex Courts I   

• Keren Weinshall, Conceptualizing Judicial Activism in Apex Courts: A Natural Language Processing Approach

11:45-12:45 Panel Discussion 

Datasets, Questions and Methods - Common Opportunities and Challenges in the Empirical Study of Apex Courts 

12:45-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00 Natural Language Processing of Apex Courts II   

• Mike Madden, Judging Readability: A Study of Opinions by Apex-Court Judges from Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States

• Elijah Hoole, Dinesha Samararatne, Yanitra Kumaraguru and Amanda Halliday, Empirical study of Sri Lanka's apex courts: taking the first step with dataset collection and exploratory analysis

15:00-15:30 Summary and Way Forward  

Expired: Call for Papers

We invite submissions on work-in-progress research relating to:

• Creating a corpus of (apex) court decisions

• Investigating apex court decisions using natural language processing, machine learning or network analysis

• Comparing decisions across courts using computational methods

• Evaluating methods for the computational analysis of apex courts

We also invite submissions that present or review

• Best practices for data collection, analysis, and dissemination relating to apex courts

• Literature reviews on the computational analysis of apex courts

• Reflections on promises and limitations on the role of computational methods

• Publication outlets and possibilities on computational analyses of apex courts

Submissions should consist either of an extended abstract that clearly describes the research methods and anticipated findings or unpublished work-in-progress papers with early results.

Deadline for submission: 15 April 2023 extended to 28 April 2023 (via EasyChair)

Communication of acceptance: 30 April 2023

Full work-in-progress papers: 15 June 2023

Workshop (in person): 23 June 2023 

Organizer:

Wolfgang Alschner, University of Ottawa, Canada (wolfgang.alschner@uottawa.ca)