JournalTOCs

Western Journal of Legal Studies
Number of Followers: 1

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1927-9132
Published by Western University

[18 journals]

The Importance of Historical Perspective
- Authors: The Honourable Malcolm Rowe
  PubDate: 2024-07-09
  DOI: 10.5206/uwojls.v15i2.19587
  Issue No: Vol. 15, No. 2 (2024)
Court, Judges and the Pandemic: Computational Legal Insights from the
Ontario Court of Appeal Corpus 2008-2021
- Authors: Wolfgang Alschner, Yazhi Zheng
  Abstract: Appellate courts occupy a unique position. They are the final instance for most litigants guiding lower courts but they are also a gateway to the Supreme Court. This dual role calls for special scrutiny and analysis. Yet, data and analysis of appeal courts remains scarce especially compared to apex courts. This article fills part of this gap relating to the Ontario Court of Appeal. It introduces a new dataset of its decisions between 2008-2021 consisting of both metadata, such as outcomes per decision, and the decision full text, which can be mined through natural language processing techniques. Aside from presenting the dataset, the paper uses novel data science approaches to trace the practice of the Court over time, to dissect the decision patterns of its judges, and to assess how the pandemic shock impacted the Court. It finds, amongst others, that the Court has been stable in its decision patterns, but that decisions have grown longer; it also shows that some judges render harsher decisions than others, and it illustrates how the pandemic created instant precedent. We hope that the new dataset and corpus will spur further research on the Ontario Court of Appeal.
  PubDate: 2024-07-09
  DOI: 10.5206/uwojls.v15i2.16977
  Issue No: Vol. 15, No. 2 (2024)

HOME > Browse the 73 Subjects covered by JournalTOCs
Subject	Total Journals