German legal decision corpus

The corpus belongs to the paper "Design and Implementation of German Legal Decision Corpora" from Urchs et al.[1].

Please cite [1] when using the corpus.

[1] Urchs Stefanie, Mitrović Jelena, and Granitzer Michael. "Design and Implementation of German Legal Decision Corpora" ICAART. 2021.

This corpus consits of 32,748 decisions of Bavarian courts (between 2015 and 2020), enriched with meta data. The decisisons are provided on the website www.gesetze-bayern.de.

These decisions are safed in the following JSON format:

{

"meta":

    { "meta_title": "",

      "court": "",

      "decision_style": "",

      "date": "",

      "file_number":"",

      "title": "",

      "norm_chains": ["", ""],

      "decision_guidelines": ["", ""],

      "keywords": "",

      "lower_court": ["", ""],

      "additional_information": "",

      "decision_reference": ""

},

"decision_text":

    { "tenor": ["",""],

      "legal_facts": ["",""],

      "decision_reasons": ["",""]

    }

}

metadata fields (not all fields are always filled):

- Meta Title: Title of the decision as stated on the website

- Court: Name of the issuing court

- Decision Style: Style of the decision

- Date: Issuing date

- File Number: File number of the descision

- Title: Title of the decision as stated by the court

- Norm Chains: Norms related to the decision

- Decision Guideline: Guidlines that lead to the decision

- Keywords: Keywords associated with the decision

- Lower Court: Court that worked with this decision beforehand

- Additional Information: more information

- Decison reference: reference to the decision in beck-online

The descision text is structured in three parts, not all parts are always filled.

- Tenor: short description of the outcomes of the legal decision issued by the court

- Legal Facts: Statment of all facts that lead to a decision

- Decision Reasons: Indepth explanaition why a court decided in a certain way.