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

法治和先例通过书面意见传达给法庭听众，包括决策者和他们所服务的公众。理解意见书的写作实践和语言有助于深入了解法官做出特定决定的动机。长期以来，司法学者一直关注案件的结果--谁赢了以及由此产生的判决政策--但较少关注其附带的语言。然而，语言在理解法治方面很重要。此外，书面意见中的沟通要素，如其情感基调、说服力和真实性，提供了关于法官的目标、偏好以及他们对困难的法律的问题的信念强度的关键信息。该项目通过探索三个重要高等法院的法庭意见中使用的语言，写作风格和交际元素，提供了一种新的司法行为理论。这些法院奉行遵循先例的普通法法律的传统，美国也是如此，但所有这些法院都以不同的程序和裁决基础运作。在不同的司法文化和环境中，学者们可以评估法治和法官的信仰如何在意见语言中被揭示出来，挑战传统上被视为不那么政治化的法院司法行为的基本假设。该项目推进了关于意见语言如何形成以及如何在不同法院环境中获得信息的学术辩论;它还为政策制定者提供了有关法院政治化的信息。这项研究为学者，政策制定者和从业人员提供了一个机会，将现有的司法数据库与多个高等法院的完全可搜索文本数据联系起来。该数据库是对现有高等法院司法数据库的一个重要补充，涵盖了这些高等法院长达50年的情况。为学术界，学生和专业观众创造了宝贵的资源，并使各种法律的政策主题的研究，这些数据提供了一个独特的机会，从比较的角度产生洞察力，并将其应用于了解民主国家的法治共享类似的法院功能。全文意见数据库将为学者和研究生提供一个资源，以定制研究问题，从多个角度研究司法行为，法律的语言和法院作为机构。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.