Presentation by Iris Schepers – Predicting Citations in Dutch Case Law with Natural Language Processing

March 2nd, 2022

EVICT’s own Iris Schepers presented at the conference for Computational Legal Studies 2022 in Singapore about her work on predicting ncoming citations for Dutch case law. With the ever-growing accessibility of case law online, it has become challenging to manually identify case law relevant to one’s legal issue. In the Netherlands, the planned increase in the online publication of case law is expected to exacerbate this challenge. In this paper, we tried to predict whether court decisions are cited by other courts or not after being published, thus in a way distinguishing between more and less authoritative cases. This type of system may be used to process the large amounts of available data by filtering out large quantities of non-authoritative decisions, thus helping legal practitioners and scholars to find relevant decisions more easily, and drastically reducing the time spent on preparation and analysis.

About the speaker

Iris Schepers is pursuing her PhD at the EVICT project, where she will focus on conceptualizing the international right to housing and its impacts. Here she gets to combine her background in Information Science with her interest in law by using data science to analyze legal big data.

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