Info

FGV Workshop Link to heading

Last week I delivered an online presentation titled ‘International Legal Data in Action: Ideas and Applications for the ICJ and PCIJ’ during Panel II of the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) Workshop “Transforming the Role of International Courts and Tribunals in a New Era of Adjudication” on 16 March 2023. The event was streamed live on YouTube and links to recordings are included in the infobox above. I have also published the slides for the presentation, also linked in the infobox.

Abstract Link to heading

There can be no Data Science without data. However, the availability of legal data sets, particularly corpora in international law, has been rather limited until recently. In this presentation I discuss two new and high-quality international legal sets for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ). These corpora collect the full-texts and metadata for all majority and minority opinions of both Courts from 1922 to 2022 and are fully compatible with each other. The ICJ corpus is updated twice a year with new data.

I further outline research questions and methods to put this international legal data into action. These include doctrinal analysis, citation analysis, social network analysis and geospatial analysis of full-texts and metadata. References to relevant papers provide an introduction to the research problems and methdologies for researchers who wish to tackle them. The presentation closes with a call for replication though the publication of source code and data.

Download Data Sets Link to heading

Academic Paper Link to heading

Fobbe, S. (2022). Introducing Twin Corpora of Decisions for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ). Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 19(2), 491-524. https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12313