Analyzing Language in Comparative Courts: A Multi-User Database of Judgment Texts in Appellate Courts

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The rule of law and precedent are communicated to court audiences – including policymakers and the public whom they serve – through written opinions. Understanding opinion writing practices and language offers insight into judges’ motivations for arriving at particular decisions. Judicial scholarship has long focused on the outcome of the case – who won and the resulting policy of a decision – but less on its accompanying language. However, language matters in understanding the rule of law. Furthermore, communicative elements in a written opinion, such as its emotional tone, persuasiveness, and authenticity, provide crucial information concerning judges’ goals, preferences, and the intensity of their beliefs on difficult legal questions. This project offers a new theory of judicial behavior by exploring language, writing styles, and communicative elements used in court opinions of three important High Courts. These courts practice the common law legal tradition of following precedent, as does the United States, yet all operate with different processes and bases for their rulings. Across diverse judicial cultures and settings, scholars can assess how the rule of law and judges’ beliefs are revealed in opinion language, challenging underlying assumptions of judicial behavior in courts that have traditionally been viewed as less political. The project advances scholarly debates on how opinion language takes shape and how it may be informed within different court settings; it also informs policymakers concerning the politicization of courts generally.This research offers an opportunity for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to link existing judicial databases with fully searchable text data across multiple High Courts. The database provides a significant supplement to the existing High Courts Judicial Database, resulting in coverage of these High Courts across a fifty-year period. Creating a valuable resource for academic, student, and professional audiences and enabling research on a variety of legal policy topics, the data provide a unique opportunity to generate insight from a comparative perspective and to apply it to understand the rule of law in democracies which share similar court features. The full-text opinion database will offer a source for scholars and graduate students to tailor research questions to examine judicial behavior, legal language, and courts as institutions from a multitude of perspectives. These data provide substantial promise for future investigations beyond this project.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.