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院受众--包括政策制定者和他们所服务的公众。了解意见撰写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，司法学术一直专注于案件的结果--谁赢了，以及由此产生的判决政策--而较少关注与之相伴随的语言。然而，语言在理解法治方面很重要。此外，书面意见中的交流元素，如其情感基调、说服力和真实性，提供了关于法官的目标、偏好和他们在疑难法律问题上信念的强度的关键信息。这个项目通过探索三个重要高等法院的法院意见书中使用的语言、写作风格和交际元素，为司法行为提供了一个新的理论。这些法院沿用普通法的法律传统，遵循先例，美国也是如此，但它们的裁决程序和依据都不同。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是如何用意见语言揭示出来的，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。该项目推动了关于意见语言如何形成以及如何在不同的法院环境中获得信息的学术辩论；它还向政策制定者提供了有关法院政治化的一般信息。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的文本数据联系起来。该数据库对现有的高等法院司法数据库提供了重要补充，从而涵盖了这些高等法院50年期间的情况。这些数据为学术、学生和专业受众创造了宝贵的资源，并使人们能够研究各种法律政策主题，提供了一个独特的机会，可以从比较的角度产生见解，并将其应用于理解具有相似法院特征的民主国家的法治。全文意见数据库将为学者和研究生提供一个来源，以定制研究问题，从多种角度审查司法行为、法律语言和作为机构的法院。这些数据为该项目以外的未来调查提供了实质性的前景。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.