JuDDGES

The overall goal of the JuDDGES project is to harness state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing & Human-In-The-Loop technologies to provide legal researchers with new Open software and tools that enable extensive, flexible and on-going meta-annotation capability (both automated and employing domain experts in-the-loop). This capability is applied to legal records/judgments from criminal courts across jurisdictions with varied legal constitutions (Poland, England & Wales). We hence seek to dissolve barriers of resources, language, data & format inhomogeneity that currently impede research on judicial decision making. In making this new software, tools and data resource open on a public repository, researchers will be empowered to develop and empirically test theories of judicial decision making and address judicial policy and practice-relevant questions. Researchers from public (legal) institutions can also reuse the data for their purposes. The application of Open Science hence also rectifies a substantial gap in the empirical legal research domain that has been slow in adopting Open Science principles. The resulting annotated pan-national dataset & toolset will constitute the largest and most comprehensive open and reusable legal research repository in Europe for research on judicial decision-making.