1. The European Union case law corpus (EUCLCORP)
Aleksandar Trklja
University of Birmingham

2. What is EUCLCORP?
The European Union case law corpus (EUCLCORP) is a standardised, multidimensional and multilingual corpus of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and of eight EU member states’ constitutional/supreme courts.

3. Project development
The project has been developed in the following phases:
Phase one: project application
Phase two: data compilation
Phase three: data annotation
Phase four: web-interface
Supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept grant
Based at the University of Birmingham (July December 2017).

4. Not just another legal database

5. Not just another legal database
Unlike conventional legal databases EUCLCORP contains the following corpus tools:
monolingual concordance lines
parallel concordance lines
collocations
frequency lists
n-grams
simple search
CQP-based search

6. Annotation
The corpus has been annotated with linguistic and external metadata information.
Linguistic information: tokenization, lemmatization, parts-of-speech tags, sentence and paragraph boundaries and enumeration of sentences and paragraphs.

7. Annotation
Non-linguistic metadata for CJEU subcorpus: text sections (Summary, Parties, Grounds, Costs, Operative Part and Subject), language of the case, case name, case number, date and cellar number.
Non-linguistic metadata for national judgments: language of the case, name of the court, date, case name and names of judges.
Sentences from ECJ judgments: aligned at the sentence level to enable the search on parallel concordance lines.

8. ECJ judgments

9. National judgments

10. Web interface and corpus tools
User-friendly interface for the search query
[lemma="increase" & tag="V.*"] ]{0,2}[ tag="N.*"]
::match.meta_date="1980.*"
within grounds

11. Web interface and corpus tools
N-grams associated
with the token ‘capable’

12. Web interface and corpus tools

13. Contribution
EUCLCORP has been created with the aim to foster the development of empirical legal linguistics studies.

14. Contribution EUCLCORP allows users to investigate in a systematic way:
the history of the meaning(s) of a particular legal term;
features that distinguish legal language from languages used in other registers;
in the case of ambiguous terms – the senses in which they are most frequently and most typically used;
the influence of national legal languages on EU case law (and vice versa);
the impact of translation on the development of EU case law;
discourse relations and argumentation patterns.

15. Thank you for your attention!