| It should be noted that these predictions are not based on the lawyers' pleadings, but on the facts and law sections from the judges' decisions.[1] There is definitely a possibility of bias in the characterization of the facts. The authors state that for their appellate court, the facts section is uncontested by the parties and derived from the lower court's findings. Even so, it is not clear whether the court's reversal rate is high or low. If low, it could be that the lower court's presentation of the facts was equally varnished. With some judges, it is possible to predict the outcome of the case from the very first sentence laying out the facts and circumstances. In a famous dissenting judgement by Lord Denning, in which he attempts to save a cricket field, the judge begins as follows:[2] In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone.
Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the
young men play and the old men watch. In the village of
Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where
they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well.
The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is
kept short. It has a good club house for the players and
seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on
Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing
with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after
work they practise while the light lasts. Yet now after
these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that
they must not play there any more.
Even with this critique, I think that this research is an excellent first step. It would be great to use pleadings, which are available with effort from some appellate courts. It would likely be necessary to OCR some PDF files.I doubt that this textual approach would work for the more technical parts of the law. Many cases are in areas with very few preceding cases from which to train an n-gram based algorithm. While the author's approach worked for certain human rights cases, it would likely fail for cases turning on an obscure tax provision. [1] Original paper: https://peerj.com/articles/cs-93/ [2] Miller v Jackson [1977] QB 966, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v_Jackson |