Useful Databases
The following is a list of freely accessible online databases that contains various legal data.
Swiss Datasets
|
Name |
Link | Description | Legal Area |
| SCD (Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset) | zenodo.org |
The Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset (SCD) provides a record of all 116,000+ cases decided by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court since 2007. The SCD includes 31 variables that document basic case information, the court composition, the area of law, information about the appealed judgment, the parties, the case outcome, and about citations and publication status. Geering Florian, Merane Jakob. (2023), Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset (SCD), Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7793043.
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All |
| Schweizer Open Government Data | opendata.swiss | Opendata.swiss is a central portal for open, freely accessible, data from the Swiss authorities (Open Government Data, OGD). The opendata.swiss portal guarantees users simple and secure central access to data of the federal government, cantons and municipalities. | All |
| FSCS (Swiss court judgments) |
Multilingual (German, French, and Italian), diachronic (2000-2020) corpus of 85'000 cases from the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland (FSCS). Niklaus Joel, Chalkidis Ilias and Stürmer Matthias (2021) “SwissJudgmentPrediction”. Proceedings of the 2021 Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop (NLLP), Zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.5529712. |
All | |
| Coercive Measures Database | Link |
SRF surveyed the number of decisions made by the courts for coercive measures in all Swiss cantons in 2017 - categorised by |
Criminal Law |
EU Datasets
| Name | Link | Information | Legal Area |
|---|---|---|---|
| JRC-Acquis |
The Acquis Communautaire (AC) is the total body of European Union (EU) law applicable in the the EU Member States. This collection of legislative text changes continuously and currently comprises selected texts written between the 1950s and now. Steinberger Ralf, Pouliquen Bruno, Widiger Anna, Ignat Camelia, Erjavec Tomaž, Tufis Dan, Varga Dániel (2006). |
European Law | |
| ECtHR |
Judicial Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. Test20 (Art. 2-8, 10-14,18): 804 decisions, test_violations (Art. 2-8, 10-14, 18): 4054 decisions, Train (Art. 2-14,18): 8441 decisions. Medvedeva Masha, Vols Michel, Wieling Martijn (2019): Github: https://github.com/masha-medvedeva/ECtHR_crystal_ball. |
Human Rights Law | |
| ECHR-OD | ECHR Open Data Explorer |
The European Court of Human Rights Open Data (ECHR-OD) project aims at providing formatted and standardized open data about the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). |
Human Rights Law |
US Datasets
|
Name |
Link | Information | Legal Area |
| US Supreme Court Database |
Information about every case decided by the US Supreme Court between 1791 and today. Harold J. Spaeth, Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, Jeffrey A. Segal, Theodore J. Ruger, and Sara C. Benesh. 2022 Supreme Court Database, Version 2022 Release 01, URL: http://Supremecourtdatabase.or. |
All |
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|
WCLD: Curated Large Dataset of Criminal Cases from Wisconsin Circuit Courts |
Github |
The WCLD is a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. Elliott Ash, Naman Goel, Nianyun Li, Claudia Marangon, Peiyao Sun, WLCD: Curated Large Dataset of Criminal Cases from Wisconsin Circuit Courts, 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) |
Criminal Law |
| DMA Corpus (Definitive Merger Agreements Dataset) | This dataset contains metadata and original EDGAR filings for 7,929 Definitive Merger Agreements (DMAs). The process used to create this dataset is described in Introducing a New Corpus of Definitive M&A Agreements, 2000-2020, available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4731282When using this dataset, please cite to the original paper. |
Global Datasets
| Name | Link | Description | Legal Area | State/Organization |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comparative Constitutions Project | CCP Data | The Comparative Constitutions Project has a comprehensive database of constitutional text, data, characteristics, and research replication. | Constitutional Law | Global |
| World Values Survey | WVS Database | The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research program devoted to the scientific and academic study of social, political, economic, religious and cultural values of people in the world. The project’s goal is to assess which impact values stability or change over time has on the social, political and economic development of countries and societies. | All | Global |
| Corpus des Deutschen Bundesrechts |
The Corpus of German Federal Law (C-DBR) is a comprehensive collection of the consolidated versions of all laws and ordinances at the federal level. The dataset uses www.gesetze-im-internet.de of the Federal Ministry of Justice as its source. Size: 6687 federal laws and ordinances of the FRG. Fobbe, Sean. (2023). Corpus des Deutschen Bundesrechts (C-DBR) (2023-01-05), Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7494474. |
All | Germany | |
| ITC and ICJ Datasets |
ITC, ICJ and Trademark Datasets in: An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research. ICJ: This database contains information on individual judge’s votes in the International Court of Justice (n=1,560). There are 103 cases from 1947 to 2003. Information about the nature and outcome of the case as well as a number of measures describing the country of the applicant, respondent, and judge are provided. These data were extracted from a larger dataset compiled by Eric A. Posner and Miguel de Figueiredo and available (along with a codebook) on Eric Voeten’s website. ITC: This dataset contains information on defendants brought up on charges in front of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (n=50), the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (n=160), and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (n=8) from 1994 to 2010. Data are available on the number of guilty counts, type of guilty counts (war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity), mitigating and aggravating factors at sentencing, and the length of sentence (both initially and on appeal). These data are excerpted from an ongoing database maintained by James David Meernik. The full database and accompaying codebook (excerpted, as applicable, below) are available at: http://www.psci.unt.edu/ meernik/International%20Criminal%20Tribunals%20Website.htm. Trademark: These data are from a survey conducted by an expert witness in a trademark case brought in 2007 in the Southern District of New York.1 The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board denied Victoria’s Secret’s application to register the mark SO SEXY for its hair care products based on the objections of Sexy Hair Concepts, LLC. Victoria’s Secret appealed this decision and one of their expert witnesses designed a survey to explore whether the word SEXY had attained a secondary meaning in relation to hair care products. ICJ Dataset: 1560 (Individual judge's votes in ICJ). ICT Dataset size: 218 (Information on defendants at the ICT). Epstein Lee, Martin Andrew D. (2014): An introduction to empirical legal research. Oxford University Press. |
International Law | International Court of Justice, Internation Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia | |
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The Swedish High Court (SeHC) Package |
Github |
The package 'sehc' primarily contains a database on the Swedish high courts, more specifically the Supreme Court (“Högsta domstolen” or “HD”) and the Supreme Administrative Court (“Högsta förvaltningsdomstolen”, previously “Regeringsrätten”, or “HFD”). It contains data on both the judgments (2482 cases) of the Supreme Court (presented for example in cases, opinions), as well as on the individual Justices that have served on the Supreme Court and the Supreme Administrative Court (presented in the table appointments). It also contains a number of handy functions for manipulating datasets and combining variables from multiple datasets to conduct common types of analysis. Lindholm, Johan; Derlén, Mattias; Naurin, Daniel (2023): Swedish High Court Database (version 0.9.1, 1 May 2023). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7883860". |
All | Sweden |
| Corpus of Resolutions: UN Security Council (CR-UNSC) | Zenodo |
The Corpus of Resolution: UN Security Council (CR-UNSC) collects and presents for the first time in human and machine-readable form all resolutions, drafts, and meeting records of the UN Security Council, including detailed metadata, as published by the UN Digital Library and revised by the authors. The current version collects resolutions 1 (1946) through 2722 (2024) in all six official UN languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian), with drafts and meeting records in English and a massive number of features. Fobbe Seán, Gasbarri Lorenzo, Ridi Niccoló: Corpus of Resolutions: UN Security Council (CR-UNSC) |
International Law | UN Security Council |