The German Federal Courts Dataset 1950–2019: From Paper Archives to Linked Open Data

• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Date: 01 September 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12230

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Volume 16, Issue 3, 671–688, September 2019

The German Federal Courts Dataset

1950–2019:

From Paper Archives to Linked Open Data

Hanjo Hamann*

Various reasons explain why Europe lags behind the United States in empirical legal studies.

One of them is a scarcity of available data on judicial decision making, even at the highest levels

of adjudication. By institutional design, civil-law judges have lower personal profiles than their

common-law counterparts. Hence very few empirical data are available on how courts are com-

posed and how that composition changes over time. The present project remedies that by eas-

ing access to such data and lowering the threshold for empirical studies on judicial behavior.

This paper introduces the German Federal Courts Dataset (GFCD) as a resource for empirical

legal scholars, with the objective of inspiring more European lawyers to engage with empirical

aspects of civil-law adjudication. To that end, several thousand pages of German court docu-

mentation were digitized, transcribed into machine-readable tables (ready to be imported into

statistics software), and published online (www.richter-im-internet.de). To simultaneously

explore innovative ways of sharing public-domain datasets, the data were modeled as linked

open data and imported into the Wikidata repository for use in any computational application.

I. Introduction

A. Motivation: Research Data for Comparative Judicial Research

Common and civil law differ markedly in the weight they put on adjudicating cases,

which entails different perspectives on the role of any given judge. In the United States,

judges are seen as producers of law, and court decisions are attributed to notable

*Address correspondence to Hanjo Hamann, Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on

Collective Goods, Bonn, currently SPILS Fellow at Stanford Law School, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, CA

94305; e-mail: hamann@stanford.edu.

I thank (in alphabetical order)Gregor Albers, Brian Cooper, Lea Faltmann, Thomas Gschwend,Kornelia Hamann,

Christoph Kling, Christian Mathieu, Claudia Mu

¨ller-Birn, Marisa Nest, Friedemann Vogel, Ivo Vogel, and Caroline

Wittig for various kinds of assistance and support, as well as German President Steinmeier for designating the Fed-

eral Courts Dataset one of Germany’s 17 “Landmark Ideas in Science” of 2017. I gratefully acknowledge funding

through the Free Knowledge Fellowship by Wikimedia Germany and the German Stifterverband, through the

research group for Computer-AssistedLegal Linguistics (CAL

2

) at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, and by the

Max Planck Digital Library(MPDL) for enabling the Open Access publicationof this paper.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

671

individuals—so empirical research tends to focus on judicial biographies (e.g., Irons

1999; Dalin 2017), judicial behavior and strategies (e.g., Murphy 1964; Epstein & Knight

1998; Rachlinski & Wistrich 2017), as well as attitudes (Schubert 1965; Segal & Spaeth

1993, 2002; www.empiricalscotus.com) and opinion language (Feldman 2016, 2017).

In contrast, European jurisdictions such as Germany conceive of judges tradition-

ally as proclaimers of law (bouche de la loi), and court decisions are handed down by “the

bench” or its subdivisions without authorship attribution. Hence quantitative empirical

research on the judiciary is rare. Excepting ethnographic studies by lawyer-sociologists in

the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Lautmann [1972] 2011), empirical research on German courts

has increasingly become the domain of social scientists (e.g., Vanberg 2005; Ho

¨nnige

2007; Krehbiel 2016), and only recently have lawyers rejoined them in studying German

courts quantitatively (Engst et al. 2017; Coupette & Fleckner 2018).

This renewed interest requires data on the internal structures of the judiciary; yet,

there is no requirement in Europe for courts even to publish their decisions, let alone

acknowledge and systematically document the judges sitting on the bench. So European

researchers are left “largely in the dark” (Ho

¨nnige & Gschwend 2010:513) about the

inner workings of even top-tier courts. This scarcity of data not only impinges on people’s

fundamental “Right of Public Access to Legal Information” (Mitee 2017) and hampers

research within civil-law jurisdictions, but also precludes research comparing the court

systems of common- and civil-law jurisdictions.

To overcome these limitations and provide a resource for empirical legal studies

in and on Europe, this article introduces the German Federal Courts Dataset (GFCD)

with data and code book available from www.richter-im-internet.de. This is a public

“multi-user dataset” (in the spirit of Epstein&Martin2014:15)onthecompositionof

the federal judiciary in Germany, as a major civil-law country, over the last 70 years. By

releasing documents and court data from as far back as the German federal courts’

(re-)establishment after World War II, it enables researchers to study some of the inner

workings of civil law adjudication. The preprocessing that went into creating this

resource was described in detail in two German reports (Hamann 2017; Hamann &

Nest 2018), so the present paper will primarily summarize its scope and user interfaces

(Section I.D), after familiarizing readers withitscontext(SectionI.B)and previouslit-

erature (Section I.C).

B. Background: The German Federal Judiciary

Germany has seven federal courts that are regionally dispersed, but centralized in

their respective subject matter authority. Consider Table 1: each court’s jurisdic-

tion extends to one area of law (e.g., labor law, tax law, administrative law) in

which it will hear all cases escalated up by lower (state) courts. Civil and criminal

cases are heard by the same court (BGH), but they are separated in Table 1 for

convenience.

Unlike most state courts in Germany, federal courts usually decide through judicial

panels, which arereferred to as “senates” (but more properlytranslated as “divisions,” follow-

ing Siehr 1977; Meador 1981:n. 25) and consist of five or more judges. Each division has

672 Hamann