Analyzing high volumes of German court decisions in an interdisciplinary class of law and computer science students

• Main Authors: BECKEDORF, Janis, HARTUNG, Dirk, SITTIG, Phillip
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Science and Technology Law
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/4532
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Both access to court decisions and collaboration of lawyers and computer scientists are limited in Germany. The University of Hamburg and Bucerius Law School join forces to address these issues as described in the introduction. The second part of this chapter gives an overview of access to court decisions in Germany. In the next part we describe a didactic concept to provide students of both fields with fundamental knowledge and an experience of collaboration with people from the other domain. In the final part, the chapter provides details of one project executed in one of the classes based on this concept. The project consists of a rule-based information extraction, a machine learning-based outcome classification and a statistical description of 56,288 decisions of the highest German civil and criminal law.