The project has resulted in a 2024 edited book Decoding the Court: Legal Data Insights from the Supreme Court of Canada published open access with Routledge. The book shows how the combination of data science with doctrinal and normative analyses can create new insights into core questions of interests to legal scholars, political scientists, and practitioners; and can inform the study of apex courts more generally.
Decoding the Supreme Court of Canada
The Supreme Court of Canada is a central institution in Canadian law and politics, and yet to date, there has been relatively little empirical research on its work. Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant, this project uses state-of-the-art legal data analytics to investigate over 4,000 Supreme Court decisions from 1975 to the end of 2021.
Team
The project team is led by Professor Carissima Mathen, a celebrated Canadian public law scholar and author of several books; Professor Wolfgang Alschner, a pioneer in the application of data analytics to the empirical study of law and head of the Legal Tech Lab, and Professor Vanessa MacDonnell, an eminent constitutional law scholar and Co-Director of the uOttawa Public Law Centre.
Read the book
Alschner, Wolfgang, Vanessa MacDonnell and Carissima Mathen, eds. Decoding the Court: Legal Data Insights from the Supreme Court of Canada. London: Routledge, 2024.
Access the data generated by the project
This dataset accompanies an edited volume on the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). It contains meta data on 4142 SCC decisions between 1975 and 2021. It builds on CanLII data provided under a licence that does not allow us to share the full text. It contains extracted information on majority vs dissent, outcome, appeal origin, word count and subject matter among others. (2023-12-15)